Mike Wagner - Perpetual beta

New Site, WWW.MikeWagnerOnline.com

2010-03-19T21:40:00.002-04:00

Title pretty much tells the story. Although I haven't been blogging much, I'll likely be focusing my attention to www.mikewagneronline.com where you can find more bio & contact info on me.

Social Media Marketing Poll

2009-06-27T03:04:00.000-04:00

I created a limited LinkedIn poll. What alone is the most effective Social Media Marketing tool poll?
http://polls.linkedin.com/poll-results/44998/soppp

Pleas take a second and share your thought.

Palo Alto-Based Picaboo Lands $1 Million in Funding

2009-06-09T17:48:00.000-04:00

Palo Alto, Calif. -- Picaboo, the Palo Alto-based developer of a custom online photo book and card printing service for consumers, has raised $1 million in new funding, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The company now has raised nearly $3 million since its founding in 2006. Picaboo competes in the growing market for custom photo books with Blurb, Viovio, SmileBooks, Snapfish, Shutterfly and Kodak. The company's previous backers include New Enterprise Associates, CampVentures, Odyssey Research, Softbank Capital Venture Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

The Enterprise Web 2.0 Trend Continues with Business Orientated Mashups

2009-06-07T14:42:00.002-04:00

By Jeff Feinman

May 14, 2009 — It started slowly. First, one person in Mexico got sick. Then another. Then more. The culprit? A strain of influenza commonly known as swine flu. But before it was identified, folks returning from that country were unwittingly bringing the deadly flu back to their homelands.

As fear of a pandemic grew, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) needed to get a handle on outbreaks of the H1N1 virus. One of the tools of their disposal was a software mashup, created by IBM, that brings together the CDC’s reporting data with Google Maps.

“The mashup could see where the outbreaks are in different regions of the country,” said Rod Smith, vice president of IBM’s emerging Internet technologies unit. “A business can now share that mashup with its stores and regions so they can see what’s going on with it, and the CDC can share it with state services, maybe to see what other health facilities or health products are out there.”

Continue Reading

Social Media and Product Marketing Consulting

2009-06-03T15:09:00.003-04:00

I've decided to go full force into the services business and offer my expertise in Product Marketing and Social Media on a consulting basis. I've started a group dedicated to connecting organizations with Social Media needs with those who can help. I just created the Facebook group so trying to get people to join to get the wave effect going. You can join the group here.

JackBe - Mashups and the DIA

2009-04-22T18:16:00.003-04:00

Happy to see JackBe still making news and especially with regards to a project which started while I was there. Click through to read the article from eweek in the entirety.

Mashups Give Defense Department Strategic Edge
( Page 1 of 4 )

Off-the-shelf Web 2.0 mashup software from JackBe aids decisions and keeps troops safe.

To make the right decision, it's essential to have the right information at the right time. But just what information is needed, when and in relation to what other information is a subtle science that tests the mettle of IT managers everywhere.

In the armed forces, victory and defeat—not to mention human life—may hang in the balance of every decision that is made. In its ongoing effort to enable better decision-making, the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency, or DISA, has deployed an enterprise mashup server running JackBe software to bring together strategic information from disparate sources, particularly geographic and mapping data.

"The DOD [Department of Defense] has the ability to mash up multiple data sources on the fly and display them geospatially with off-the-shelf products," said DISA CTO David Mihelcic.

continued....

Summon Service Adds New Content Providers and Beta Partner

2009-04-16T17:33:00.002-04:00

Serials Solutions (www.serialssolutions.com), a business unit of ProQuest, has added several new content providers and a new library beta development partner for its Summon unified discovery service. The service is being developed in close cooperation with library beta partners, with a goal of not only bringing the researcher back to the library but providing a channel for greater return on the library's content investment. The new partner, Western Michigan University, which will use the Summon service with its VuFind next-generation catalog, joins Dartmouth College, Oklahoma State University, University of Sydney, and University of Liverpool in providing feedback that will refine all aspects of the service.

New content providers include IEEE, the pre-eminent engineering society, information technology publisher IGI Global, international scholarly publishing leader Brill, and a pair of Australian presses that expand the service's local coverage. The Summon service's contributors, which include the content resources of ProQuest and Gale, have expanded to more than 80. Harvested content now exceeds 400 million records in preparation for the service's July launch.

Summon bypasses federated search in favor of a single search against preharvested content enabling fast results, in true relevancy-ranked order. Publishers have embraced the service for this ability to surface content in the right context at the right time for the right user. The Summon unified discovery service creates a library-branded search box that eliminates the confusion users have in finding a starting point for library research, making collections simple to use. The hosted service is built with an open API that will allow it to integrate with existing library websites or campus systems with low impact on staff. To learn more about the Summon unified discovery service, visit www.serialssolutions.com/summon.

New Discovery Tools for Online Resources From OCLC and EBSCO

2009-04-16T17:29:00.000-04:00

by Paula J. Hane

Providing a single point of access to a broad range of library materials seems to be emerging as the Holy Grail of the library world. Libraries provide a vast richness of content, but that content has historically resided in separate silos of storage and access-books in the catalog, subscription content from multiple providers, ebooks, archival collections, electronic journals, and other resources on the web. Library vendors have approached the problem with federated search products that search remotely and rely on connectors, but these are generally seen to be only partial and limited solutions. However, new discovery tools have begun to appear that promise to provide a single interface to multiple resources based on using a centralized consolidated index to provide faster and better search results. Serials Solutions (www.serialssolutions.com) announced its Summon service in January (see NewsBreak) and garnered much interest; it is currently in beta testing in a small number of libraries with general availability expected in July. The recent announcements from OCLC and EBSCO have just moved the discovery tool competition to a new level. Now it's not just about which library vendor has the latest technology but which provides access to the most content.
--> http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/AP-Challenges-Google-and-Other-Ne ws-Aggregators-at-Newspaper-Conference-53423.asp

Serials Solutions Signs Beta Partner WMU and New Content Providers for the Summon™ Unified Discovery Service

2009-04-14T18:34:00.000-04:00

April 14, 2009
Serials Solutions Signs Beta Partner WMU and New Content Providers for the Summon™ Unified Discovery Service

IEEE, Brill, IGI, and Australian presses bring new content to rapidly expanding service
Serials Solutions, a business unit of ProQuest, has signed Western Michigan University as a beta development site for its new Summon™ unified discovery service. New content providers will also participate. Among them are IEEE, the world's pre-eminent engineering society, information technology publisher IGI-Global, international scholarly publishing leader Brill and a pair of Australian presses that expand the service's local coverage. The Summon™ service's contributors, which include the massive content resources of ProQuest and Gale, have expanded to more than 80. Harvested content now exceeds 400 million records in preparation for the service's July launch.
Announced in January, the Summon™ unified discovery service has captured the attention of both librarians and publishers for its creation of Google-like searching of the full breadth of content found in library collections -- from books and videos to e-resources at the article level. The Summon™ service addresses what research shows is a fundamental barrier between libraries and users: a simple, obvious starting point for searches.
The service is being developed in close cooperation with library beta partners, with a goal of not only bringing the researcher back to the library, but providing a channel for greater return on the library's content investment. Western Michigan University, which will use the Summon™ service with its VuFind next-generation catalog, joins Dartmouth College, Oklahoma State University, University of Sydney and University of Liverpool in providing feedback that will refine all aspects of the service.
The Summon™ service bypasses federated search in favor of a single search against pre-harvested content enabling fast results, in true relevancy-ranked order. Publishers have embraced the service for this ability to surface content in the right context at the right time for the right user. The journals of IEEE bring significant engineering content, while Brill and IGI Global will contribute high-quality research publications in multiple fields. Australian content is expanding with the addition of University of Queensland Press, a dynamic university press best known for its risk-taking philosophy and commitment to publishing works of cultural significance, and Australian Academic Press, the largest privately owned Society journal publisher in Australia. Other recently added contributors include Adam Matthew Digital, American Society of Hematology, American Society for Microbiology, Annual Reviews, IOS Press, John Libbey Eurotext and Publishing House Technika.
The Summon™ unified discovery service creates a library-branded search box that eliminates the confusion users have in finding a starting point for library research, making collections simple to use. It's the result of Serials Solutions' unique combination of assets and expertise, enabled by its growing list of content providers. The hosted service is built with an open API that will allow it to integrate with existing library Web sites or campus systems with low impact on staff. To learn more about the Summon™ unified discovery service, visit http://www.serialssolutions.com/summon.
About Serials Solutions
Founded by a librarian for librarians in 2000, Serials Solutions is the global leader in E-Resource Access and Management Services (ERAMS) that serves more than 2,000 libraries of all sizes and types. Serials Solutions® KnowledgeWorks, the authoritative e-resource knowledgebase, is the foundation for Serials Solutions® 360, the only complete and integrated e-resource access and management solution. Serials Solutions recently introduced the Summon™ unified discovery service, a revolutionary discovery tool that provides instant access to the full breadth of the library's collection through a single search.
Serials Solutions also is the exclusive source for Ulrichs™ Global Serials Intelligence and represents the AquaBrowser Library® unified discovery interface in the academic market in North America. The WebFeat® federated search service recently acquired by ProQuest soon will be incorporated into the Serials Solutions family of access and discovery services.
Serials Solutions provides fast implementation, easy customization, and outstanding value to libraries throughout the world. For more information, please visit www.serialssolutions.com or call 1-866-SERIALS. Serials Solutions is a division of ProQuest LLC.

About ProQuest LLC

ProQuest creates specialized information resources and technologies that propel successful research and lifelong learning. A global leader in serving libraries of all types, ProQuest offers the culmination of experience from many respected brands, including CSA™, UMI®, Chadwyck-Healey™, SIRS®, and eLibrary®. With Serials Solutions®, Ulrich's™, RefWorks®, COS™, and Dialog® brands now in the ProQuest family, the company continues to build on its legacy of responsive people in partnership with librarians.
ProQuest consistently seeks new ways to support researchers and quality research. More than a content provider or aggregator, ProQuest is an information partner, creating indispensable research solutions that connect people and information. Through innovative, user-centered technology, ProQuest offers a depth and breadth of global content that includes historical newspapers, dissertations, and uniquely relevant resources for researchers of any age and sophistication--including content not likely to be digitized by others. Inspired by its customers and end users, ProQuest is working toward a future that blends information accessibility with community to further enhance learning and encourage lifelong enrichment. For more information, visit www.proquest.com or the ProQuest parent company website, www.cambridgeinformationgroup.com.

Serials Solutions

2009-04-10T01:06:00.004-04:00

I joined the Summon product team at Serials Solutions this week as the product marketing manager. I have to say, it was the potential I saw in this streamlined information discovery service that was the tipping point in choosing the oppertunity over others. Just as Newspapers have been dropping like flies, acedemic libraries face a very real challenge of exposing the breadth of information in a streamlined fashion in keeping with the paradim establish by Google. Libraries are realizing that information if undiscoverable is meaningless in this experimental learning culture. Meaning, if the discovery process is not streamlined to the standards of the web search engines, people will pop out to the web and bypass all the resources behind the walled garden of the institution. Summon, unified discovery service soon to be released by Serial Solutions, aims to solve this problem... and it does as proven in early beta tests.

More to come....

And The Winner is..... Mac

2009-04-02T02:44:00.002-04:00

That's right, I went with the MacBook Pro and am extremely happy. 4gigs if proving more than enough to virtualize with Parrallels and run Windows XP for some windows only apps I run. Thanks to all that took the poll and or sent me their feedback.

Mac or Vaio

2009-03-22T16:50:00.001-04:00

Using the power of the crowd to help me decide so please cast your vote on what should be my new laptop.

Get This - Survey Results - GlowDay.com

Luis Derechin of JackBe on Fox News

2009-03-17T03:36:00.002-04:00

JackBe still going strong.

Another New Chapter

2009-03-08T00:31:00.002-05:00

Its been a while since I've written a personal post but the time seems to be right. I, like so many others currently, found myself victim to business reorganization. Although I agree in part, I still believe the decision was short sighted. Never the less, these are unprecedented times and with that comes uncharacteristic opportunities. For the time being I will most likely offer my broad business and product marketing skills and experience via consulting and contract work. In addition, as when I first arrived in Seattle, I have more time to work with the true startups in the area.

Stay tuned.

DocuSign Developer Center

2009-02-05T01:30:00.003-05:00

In an effort to foster Electronic Contract Execution and Electronic Signature solutions, DocuSign has officially launched its developer center. Now developers can download API and SDK materials as well as set up a developer account to test against a dedicated development environment. I'm excited to see what creative applications folks will create to streamline their organizations arcaic contract processes.

DocuSign Unveils New Scalable Product and Support Offerings for Electronic Signature and Electronic Contract Execution

2009-02-03T02:05:00.002-05:00

After a grueling number of months aligning the product road map with service packages that make sense to all market segments, I am proud to provide the following press release.

DocuSign Unveils New Scalable Product and Support Offerings for Electronic Signature and Electronic Contract Execution

SEATTLE - January 28, 2009 - DocuSign, the industry leading provider of on-demand electronic signature and electronic contract execution solutions, today announced its new DocuSign Professional Edition and DocuSign Corporate Edition are available now at www.docusign.com. The new product and support offerings were designed specifically to create a scalable cost-effective on-demand solution for businesses of all sizes to replace the expensive and inefficient process of transporting, signing, tracking, storing contracts and capturing business data.

DocuSign Corporate Edition also features the industry's first 'Smart Envelopes™ for the precise management of complex workflows that require multiple documents and signers. A sender using Smart Envelopes uploads the documents to be signed and can easily define policies for who can view each document and the precise order in which they are to be signed by each signer. By giving the sender complete control and visibility into the contract execution process and streamlining otherwise complex contracting processes, Smart Envelopes dramatically reduces NIGO ("not in good order") rates, enables enterprises to complete more transactions and ultimately accelerates the speed of business.

Businesses today are under tremendous pressure to manage the bottom line. By eliminating inefficient business processes, such as paper-based contract execution, organizations can dramatically reduce costs, accelerate business transactions and potentially avoid staff reductions. According to Xerox research, businesses print more than 18 trillion pieces of paper each year and HP predicts that by 2010, 53 trillion pages will be printed worldwide. DocuSign customers can slash up to 90 percent in paper processing costs and reduce overnight express shipping fees by 80 percent, while increasing sales contract close rates - resulting in a significant net increase to their bottom line.

"Given this tough economic climate, corporations are moving to replace inefficient business processes and adopt proven software-as-a-service offerings that deliver immediate business benefits," said Tom Gonser, founder and vice president of product strategy. "By automating the contracting and data collection process with solutions such as Smart Envelopes, DocuSign enables efficiencies that cannot be achieved or replicated by any other electronic or paper-based process. Already, DocuSign has executed more than 20 million signature events worldwide."

New Scalable Product and Support Offerings for Electronic Signature and Electronic Contract Execution Drive Value for Organizations of All Sizes

DocuSign Corporate Edition - A broad set of capabilities that deliver a complete electronic contract execution platform which can be used as a separate service or completely integrated into the organizations applications environment. The new Smart Envelopes capability simplifies and accelerates complex contract execution workflows (e.g. business-to-business-to-consumer transactions) by allowing the sender to specify multiple signers to receive multiple documents and define specific visibility and workflow for each in a single transaction.

DocuSign Professional Edition - Ideal for individuals or small businesses that want to use electronic signatures to immediately reduce hard costs such as overnight express or courier expenses, speed business transactions and enhance customer satisfaction by enabling clients to sign from anywhere there is an internet connection. New self-branding capabilities enable customers to customize logos, colors, and email text to create a tailored sending and signing experience that maintains their brand consistency.

Pricing, Availability and Support
The new DocuSign Corporate Edition and DocuSign Professional Edition are available now for immediate online signup at www.docusign.com. Professional Edition: starts at $15.95/month for a single user with an annual commitment. Pricing for Corporate Edition varies based on desired features, functionality and frequency of use.

DocuSign now offers support tiers to meet the individual needs of each of its customers, ranging from the largest enterprises to sole proprietorships. From outsourcing help desk calls to providing online training, DocuSign's flexible support and training packages are designed to meet the needs of organizations of all sizes.

About DocuSign Inc.
DocuSign is the DocuSign Inc., the #1 provider of on-demand software services for electronic signature and online contract execution, empowering individuals, small business and global enterprises to operate faster, more efficiently and profitably with enhanced security and compliance. DocuSign is the only Web-based service to fully automate the entire contract execution process. To date, more than 16 million signature events have been executed using DocuSign. Experience the service at www.docusign.com, and for regular updates go to blog.docusign.com.

DocuSign and the DocuSign logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of DocuSign, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. All other marks are property of their respective owners.

JackBe Lands $5 Million, Names Wayne Jackson as Chairman

2008-12-16T21:52:00.002-05:00

My old alder mater has raised $5 Million is a tough market to say the least only proving to me the strength of JackBe's Enterprise Mashup Solution is recognized as the market leader in that space. I was with JackBe from early on when it was known for its leading Ajax toolkit and widget library and watched the transformation by the leading hands of three former principle Sun Microsystems engineers (John Crupi, Deepak Alur, and Danny Malks), into the worlds first Enterprise Mashup Platform. All this was happening the same time Oreily coined the term Web 2.0 and the world barely knew what a 'Mashup' was other than now folks could see ballons overlayed on Google Maps. How far we've come and I know that JackBe is still on the leading edge of this movement pushing these solutions into acceptance as a means to build situational applications that optimize business processes.

It was an experience watching all this unfold and I see the same thing happening at my current company DocuSign. As JackBe had market leading technology it didn't stop there and extended it providing more value. At DocuSign we're doing the same thing. Taking the leading Electronic Signature solution and by layering greater functionality around, have developed what we see as the market's first Electronic Contract Execution system. Able to wrap contract in security, workflow, and transaction execution capabilities, and provide a situational transaction network between existing systems such as CRM or CMS and the parties outside of the system needing to execute the transaction.

It will be an exciting year but the JackBe news rienforces to me that great solutions will thrive even in the most challanging of markets.

Product Marketing in Seattle

2008-12-02T22:28:00.004-05:00

Its been a while since I've posted. I've settled in at my new opportunity as Director of Product Marketing at DocuSign. DocuSign is the market leader in Electronic Signature and Online Contract execution. Its going to be exciting. Like at JackBe, the company is poised to take a leadership position in what I see becoming a new enterprise software category. At JackBe it was Enterprise Mashups. DocuSign's solution has moved beyond a point solution of electronic signatures, and has been adding business process capabilities over the past year to integrate with other systems such as CRM and CMS and wrap documents in security, and processes management to facilitate legally binding contracts to move outside the corporate firewall and back again all while capturing the metadata of the transaction. In this sence Electronic Contract Execution extends systems capabilites outside the firewall like BPM manages processes internally among a trusted network. Its an exciting oppertunity and the company is well positioned even in these economic times to do very well.

Social Media Strategy

2008-07-11T01:44:00.009-04:00

I've been working for the past month with Visible Technologies, a company pioneering the path for companies to monitor, analyze and engage in the consumer generated media. I've also found that there are few straight forward explanations about the steps necessary to reach the last engagement phase and to do so in a manner that ensures success, eg proper preparation, strategy and the tools required to execute.

So I wanted to see if I could draw upon a real life analogy. I call it the "Cocktail Party Conversation". Enjoy

Analogy: Take for instance a cocktail party and group of people having a conversation you wish to enter without making a fool of yourself. When approaching the group, the likely and most appropriate first action, would be to Listen. Gain context on what is being said, who is saying what, and their respective opinions on said topic.

This is the necessary first step that begins to build a relationship foundation but has borders and characteristics unto itself. For instance, listening is basically about gathering data. To do this requires the appropriate tools, eg. physical ear and a decent quality of hearing and memory. These tools at this stage are suited for this one task, listening, which has one objective, to gather.

To further advance towards one’s goal a being an active participant in the conversation there is another step that we take if even though it is often an unconscious one. It is that of interpretation and analysis. We take all the gathered data we heard and Learn from it. Learning implies an analysis of a set of data to extract information from it. One needs to learn who has opinions about what topics in the conversation. Learn the social dynamic of the group and who seems to exert the most influence?

By Listening one is able to gather data but this is the limit/only purpose of this phase. To further advance, or rather consider participating in intelligently, this data has to be interrupted before one can engage in the conversation. Just as with listening, learning has specific tools and characteristics that make it distinct from the other two phases. For instance, the mind captures, arranges and draws patterns from the data to extract actionable information. We contemplate about this data means; the meaning behind the words. This analyzing phase allows a person to target and form a plan of engagement. Again, this usually happens unconsciously, but this is what is happening. We use this step to plan when we are going to open our mouths, what are we going to say, what tone to use, and who to initially direct the message to.

The final phase is Leverage, and what I mean by this is leverage everything you’ve learned to now move forward and participate with this knowledge in the conversation. Here’s where we open our mouth and execute the strategy formalized in the last step. Here’s where we control our message and direct our attention to those in the group we deem most desirable to achieve our stated goal, usually message acceptance. In real time we gauge the groups reactions and adjust our speak where necessary. We our now truly engaged in an active conversation we wished to be apart of.

Now consider the group we wished to speak to is as larger hundreds of millions, growing everyday, and they are all speaking to each other about you whether you like it or not. They spread rumors or praise about you and others all while you stand there quietly. Now imagine you’re a large enterprise with an enormous amount invested in your offline brand image and reputation and you find that that doesn’t carry over to the consumer generated, world as well.

I guess its time to start this conversation process with the world. Its time to start managing your online reputation and engaging but as we know brand management and corporate marketing is a bit more complex than the analogy. All the more reason to entrust this valuable asset in a trusted partner to guide you through this process with solutions at each of these stages allowing you to scale and eventually engage successfully.

This is an analogy so please let me know what you think.

Latest Seattle 2.0 Startup Ratings

2008-07-09T20:07:00.003-04:00

Almost broke the 100 mark for applicant tracking and resume management system company Catch the Best. Maybe next month.

Applicant Tracking System Integrates Posting to Indeed.com

2008-07-03T01:26:00.003-04:00

Applicant Tracking System Catch the Best integrates posting to Indeed.com.

Applicant Tracking System Launches New Questionnaire Functionality

2008-06-08T15:16:00.005-04:00

We here at Catch the Best are pleased to announce the addition of integrated questionnaires into the applicant tracking system. You can learn more about it and other hiring features back on our site.

Applicant Tracking System, Organize

2008-06-06T03:19:00.002-04:00

Applicant Tracking System and Resume Management

Applicant Tracking System, Collaboration

2008-06-06T03:18:00.001-04:00

Applicant Tracking System and Resume Management

Catch the Best Applicant Tracking System Demo

2008-06-02T23:55:00.004-04:00

I put together a short 2min demo of the process of creating an open position that is easily tracked and search engine optimized.

Try the Applicant Tracking System and Resume Management yourself for free.

Seattle Mass Transit Blackhole

2008-05-30T13:31:00.009-04:00

I am a Seattle newbie, via Washington DC for five years, from Wisconsin originally. Over the past two months I've both experience and received various opinions about the Seattle mass transit "system" or lack there of. I emphasize "system" for a reason. From wikipedia a system is "is a set of interacting or interdependent entities, real or abstract, forming an integrated whole." I have yet to see any indication of this in the greater Seattle area aside from buses; which I want to point out, I don't consider a viable mass transit system since:

1. Routes are limited and transferring is a timely pain.
2. They share and add to traffic congestion.
3. Have a limited capacity load much smaller than other mass transit systems

The Seattle Streetcar, SLUT as its known locally, around the South Union lake area isn't an suitable mass transit system as its confined to a relatively small area and if expanded would again add to street level congestion and headaches.

What I'm talking about is suitable rail system similar to those in D.C., NY, and Boston among other large cities. The need here in Seattle is arguably even greater for such a rail system given the bottleneck bridges crossing Lake Washington and that growth is limited in the downtown area and will continue to spread to the other side of the lake.

Ideal solution: An underground metro rail from Seatac airport up through downtown Seattle with east/west routes popping up to cross Lake Washington along the 520 and I-90 briges and connecting again North to South on the Bellevue side. You'll see a crude white path here.

Seattle is not the only West Coast city facing this challenge. Recently, Steve Hymon of the Los Angles times wrote an article about similar traffic and transit problems there. He even cited Seattle resident, Edward Martin's Youtube video and commentary on the Seattle Transit's inability to time traffic lights correctly adding to increased congestion.

I'm not saying that planning and funding a project of this scale is easy or inexpensive but with oil hitting all time highs, congestion a constant problem for commuters, and the green environment movement taking center stage again, I was/am disappointed that the greater Seattle area has not taken real positive steps solving these problems for the generations who want to live and work here for decades to come not to downplay the environment as well.

Applicant Tracking Solution

2008-05-25T03:59:00.001-04:00

I put together a crude demo of some of Catch the Best's on demand applicant tracking solution's features and functionalities. Applicant Tracking System and Resume Management

Applicant Tracking Tool for Hiring Managers

2008-05-16T22:02:00.006-04:00

Problem: You're a hiring manager, not a professional recruiter, who needs hire the best candidate quickly while still doing your day job. Quickly, your email inbox fills with resumes, you forward them on to other decision team members for feedback. Some respond quickly, others more slowly. Meanwhile, you are trying to keep track of peoples thoughts on each candidate while still more resumes and follow-ups are filling your inbox. All you need is a thumbs up or thumbs down from your team on each candidate and some rational as to why. Now, some additional supporting documents have arrived from a number of candidates so you forward them on as well. These docs change some team member's opinions but you're beginning to lose track of who said what and about who, after all, this is not your day job but hiring the right person is critical to your teams future.

It was this problem the founder of CatchTheBest had as a development team lead trying to hire the best candidates for his team. Obviously not his primary responsibility but a critical component none the less. His solution was to develop an easy, one-stop web application where he and his team could share candidate information, documents, and feedback efficiently without filing up their inboxes. Essentially a lightweight, on demand applicant tracking system. They needed to go about their day jobs but feel confident they were communicating effectively about hiring the right person.

The value is time, the savings are immeasurable once you've found the right person. The lesson is don't let them slip through the cracks because of collaboration difficulties because now you don't need to. CatchTheBest has four subscription plans with a Free subscription as one of them so why not try it if you can relate.

Docverse and Collaboration

2008-05-11T22:23:00.001-04:00

There is always a need for greater collaboration within businesses. Today, that need is greater than ever as older standard software tools such as Microsoft Office meet the newer user-driven, social collaboration trends we've all experienced with the web 2.0 paradigm shift. Our jobs increasingly on this collaboration with others only now, the tools which have become standard in our lives weren't developed to meet the sharing ease experienced in newer social platforms in our personal lives.

There are a lot of good ideas in the world, but the ones that succeed in creating a business around solve real, practical problems. This is when I came across DocVerse and had a chance to speak with one of the founders Shan Sinha. DocVerse is in private beta but aims to solve these collaboration problems between Office products by enabling the storing and exchanging all types of documents painless and easy.

We can't keep clogging our email inboxes with version 1,2,3,4...... of a document. Hopefully DocVerse will change this.

Ontela, The Last Mobile Mile?

2008-05-10T17:41:00.008-04:00

I met Mike Arcuri, VP Product Management, of Ontela the other day which convinced me they are really on to something there. Take a use case from my own book. I have a Blackberry Pearl which I love. I bought it because I can do everything I need to do all wrapped up in little package I can fit in my pocket. My sister and I were taking a ferry ride the other day and she asked if I wanted a picture of me with the Seattle skyline in the background. I said sure and handed her my Blackberry which, with its decent camera, doubles as my only camera.

This is the world we live in. The only quirk I've found in the past is that I 'dislike' Blackberry's software. To transfer my pics to my pc I have to go through a variety of multiple steps. It is this "last mile" of photo transfer and organization where Ontela PicDeck technology comes in for me a consumer. There are a plethora of business opportunities for carries that opens up a world of new revenue generating opportunities with its robust and reliable technology that seamlessly brings together a user’s mobile device, PC, and favorite online image services.

Forrester: Enterprise Mashups to Hit $700 Million by 2013

2008-05-06T19:23:00.004-04:00

Even though I left JackBe awhile back, I still follow the Mashup space. I was pleased to read this report from Forrester on the state of the Enterprise Mashup market. This market is fundamentally different from the Google Map mashups many think of when they hear the term. At a basic level, Enterprise Mashups provide a new, more user-driven integration capabilities of enterprise services behind the firewall. From a business perspective, this has great potential to optimize internal processes and work flow while leveraging and realizing greater returns investments in SOA and other web services. They provide enterprise business units to create governed situational applications to react more quickly to changing needs without having to rely on IT to do the heavy lifting.

I still believe true enterprise adoption will take some time, but if this report is any validation, there is a bright future for enterprise mashups and companies like JackBe.

From ReadWriteWeb:

"A new report from Forrester Research predicts that mashups will be coming to the enterprise in a big way -- to the tune of a $700 million market by 2013. Mashup platforms that make it easier for consumer to create mashup applications, such as Yahoo! Pipes, Dapper, or Microsoft Popfly, are beginning to have analogues in the enterprise space. "Mashup platforms are in the pole position and ready to grab the lion's share of the market -- and an entire ecosystem of mashup technology and data providers is emerging to complement those platforms," says Forrester analyst G. Oliver Young.

Forrester defines mashups as "custom applications that combine multiple, disparate data sources into something new and unique." Starting in 2005, says the report, with the proliferation of free APIs, mashups came to the web in a big way, combining data and visualization tools from multiple services in meaningful and useful ways. More recently, mashup platforms have emerged that have allowed consumers with little or no development experience to create their own mashups......"

Lilipip

2008-05-02T01:58:00.002-04:00

I met Ksenia, the CEO and founder of Lilipip, tonight at the DEMO Cocktail party in Seattle. I took some time to look through the beta site and have to say, I'm impressed. Lilipip sets out find the finest short kids videos from all over the planet to enjoy at home or out on-the-go. Think of it like a youtube tailored for various age bracketed kids. Its always great meeting passionate entrepreneurs and Ksenia is definitely one of them.

Interviewing Differences

2008-05-02T01:30:00.003-04:00

I've noticed that I need to adjust my interviewing techniques to Seattle. I've been used to a more traditional interview format where a hard-nose, high-energy attitude or composure was looked on as a positive trait. Getting to know 'who you are' and whether the cultural fit is right comes later. First and foremost your ability to do the job and ability to articulate that comes first. Needless to say, I've found that to be more successful here in Seattle, I have to tone down dramatically as to not 'frighten' whoever is sitting across from me. The good part is, the result is not a fictional character but really who I am on a daily basis in and out of the work environment.

SEATTLE
Dress: No tie, maybe a suit but a nice button-down shirt and pants are usually fine
Conversation: Relaxed, more about getting to know one another and assessing a cultural fit.

DC
Dress: Suit, Tie
Conversation: High energy, down to business, sell yourself.

This type of information would have been useful before the fact but I found that there wasn't a good resource to compare specifics like this between two entities. I did met the founders of a company who's vision is to change this though. Diffen is a wiki powered collection of comparisons that people all over the world help write and maintain. The underlying data is user-generated to please feel free to add your own comparisons and build a much needed information source.

Seattle Open Coffee

2008-04-30T21:50:00.003-04:00

I was encouraged to go to a weekly networking/entrepreneur get together yesterday and glad I did. It was Seattle Open Coffee started by Andy Stack at Louisa's Coffee. As opposed to many networking events, this was smaller and over coffee which allowed myself and others to actually get to know each other and share ideas and thoughts.

It's every Tuesday of the week from 8:30AM till 10AM at Louisa's on 2379 Eastlake Ave E. You can read about it on upcoming here and here. Perhaps I'll see you there next Tues.

Speaking of the Semantic Web.....

2008-04-29T19:18:00.003-04:00

How about the semantic OS? I saw a demo today of ActiveWords which made me think of exactly this. We have become accustomed to not being capable of executing the actions on our machines without flipping through through menus or hitting a series of shortcut keys (I personally know more shortcut combos than I ever cared too). ActiveWords bypasses this by allowing users to customize actions in Microsoft's product by creating key words typed whenever and wherever to execute specific actions. Example: you're in Excel and need to search google.... simply type the word you correlate with executing a browser and directing it to Google, press the space bar a couple of times and boom, you're in Google. This is just one example of how users can customize their work patterns so as to not have to waste time or thought in how to execute specific actions.

Check it out for free, and spread the word. Download

CHCG Update

2008-04-28T14:45:00.002-04:00

A good breakdown of my trade pick of the year China 3C Group ticker CHCG.OB. Keep loading up at any price sub-$2 per share and hold on.

The company itself has been a money making machine over the past 2 years. The cash flow and earnings per employee is through the roof. At these levels it looks very very underpriced. If CHCG uses its cash for additional expansion, revenue/earnings could easily double. This makes it a growth story.
Shareholder Equity
Shares Outstanding 52.7 M
Institutional Ownership 7.77%
Number of Floating Shares 42.7 M
Short Interest as % of Float --

Valuation (MRQ)
Price/Earnings (TTM) 4.09x
Price/Sales 0.34x
Price/Book 1.63x
Price/Cash Flow 5.32x

CHCG's P/E Ratio is lower than 88% of other companies in the Audio & Video Equipment industry. This typically means that investors are willing to pay less for its level of earnings relative to future growth.Profitability (TTM)
Gross Margin 17.89%
Operating Margin 12.95%
EBITDA Margin 12.97%
Profit Margin 8.30%

CHCG's Gross Margin is less than 73% of other companies in the Audio & Video Equipment industry, which means it has less cash to spend on business operations as compared to its peers. As indicated by the Operating Margin, CHCG controls its costs and expenses better than 92% of its peers.Financial Strength (MRQ)
Quick Ratio 6.22x
Current Ratio 7.38x
Debt/Equity 0.00x
Debt/Assets 0.00x
Management Effectiveness (TTM)
Return on Assets 44.43%
Return on Equity 51.90%
Return on Inves. Capital 51.90%

The Return on Equity for CHCG shows that it is able to reinvest its earnings more efficiently than 97% of its competitors in the Audio & Video Equipment industry. Typically, companies that have higher return on equity values are more attractive to investors.Growth Rate (TTM)
Earnings Per Share growth 82.3%
Sales growth 86.2%
Dividend (MRQ) --

CHCG's EPS Growth Rate is greater than 79% of its peers in the Audio & Video Equipment industry.Dividend (TTM)
Dividend Yield --
Payout Ratio 0.00%
Annual Dividend 0.00

CHCG does not pay a dividend. The average dividend yield for companies in the Audio & Video Equipment industry is 0.20% Operating Ratios (TTM)
Asset Turnover 5.35%
Inventory Turnover 47.69%
Receivables Turnover 34.31%
Effective Tax Rate 35.92%

Long Tail

2008-04-28T14:39:00.001-04:00

There is a good post over at ZDNet about the Long Tail we've been hearing about the last few years. Definitely worth a read especially if new to the term.

"Commentary--The "Long Tail" moniker has been used extensively (some would say overused) in marketing and mass media over the last couple years. Now, as different use cases for SOA evolve, the metaphor seems appropriate to explain the growing use of services outside of the core domains of SOA, business process implementation and integration. First, let’s take a step back. The term “long tail,” coined....."

http://news.zdnet.com/2424-3515_22-199150.html

Update: China 3C "buy," target price reduced

2008-03-21T02:15:00.002-04:00

Target price may be reduced - but not that much considering the level one could enter the stock now.

03/18/08 - Maxim Group

NEW YORK, March 18 (newratings.com) - Analyst Albert Lee of Maxim Group maintains his "buy" rating on China 3C Group Inc (CHCG), while reducing his estimates for the company. The 12-month target price has been reduced from $7 to $5.

In a research note published this morning, the analyst mentions that the company has posted its EPS and sales for the previous year short of the estimates. China 3C’s guidance for 2008 indicates that the sales momentum in 2H08 would be offset by higher-than-previously-anticipated gross margin pressure, the analyst adds. There is low near-term visibility into the company’s internal unit expansion strategy, Maxim Group says. The EPS estimate for 2008 has been reduced from $0.62 to $0.44.

China 3C Group, (CHCG)

2008-03-17T15:21:00.005-04:00

For those who know me know I have been investing since I was 15. Every once in awhile I divert from the usual web 2.0 topics to that of a investment I have taken a position in. Today is one of those days since China 3C Group, CHCG has gotten pummeled today as what I believe to be a over-reaction by speculators to FY2007 results today. I consider the consumer electronics retail sector in China as an opportunity to reap the history of one of the fastest growing staples of any growing economy. Mix that with $25 million in cash on the books and a solid, real (sometimes you just don't know with over the counter stocks). As always, do your own DD but as I see it the stock still looks extremely cheap on a valuation basis even after the guidance, and is building a base on which to spring higher. Not including cash and simply assigning an industry PE of 10 we should be at $4.50 on normal growth rates. Besides the speculators, & extremely volatile world markets, the company has still struggled to provide decent insight through PR about operations leading to rumors, misinformation, and like what we saw today, over-reaction.

Here is China OTC Player's take:

Monday, March 17, 2008

Update: CHCG.OB Pummeled

revenues and earnings were quite stellar. Sales increased by 86% to $276 million and EPS was $0.44, the high end of guidance. Yet, the stock has fallen to its 52-week low. Why is this the case?

Well, it looks like Q1 2008 is going to be pretty bad. We already know that the recent winter storm was devastating, and now CHCG is quantifying it for us:

The first quarter of 2008, which is seasonally the Company's strongest quarter, is expected to be negatively impacted by the heavy snow storms that paralyzed much of China during January and February of this year. The Company believes that 2008 first quarter revenue results could fall by as much as 15-20% compared to prior year results of $84.5 million.

Given this, CHCG is expecting overall FY2008 revenues to be flat in the best case scenario, and perhaps even be 5% less than 2007's figure, not accounting for acquisitions. There is an important implication in this, which is: same-store sales growth for the last three quarters of 2008 is expected to equal, at the most, $16.9 million, or looking at it another way, the implied growth rate is a paltry 8.8%, at best. Also note that CHCG closed about 27 non-performing stores in the last three months, and is looking to close another 100+ over the course of the year.

And there is worse news. Due to mandated employee benefits, CHCG's operational margins will be negatively impacted, by up to 5%. I'm now estimating a FY2008 EPS of $0.25 for the company, which would be a decline of over 40% from 2007. Having said that, China 3C has cash of approx. $25 million and is looking to make an acquisition, possibly in the second half of 2008. The company may also consider a share buy back.

I am long and added more today. If your not light-hearted and can take some turbulence, you might want to consider.

Differences in 2.0'S; Reborn

2008-03-04T09:35:00.002-05:00

Sort of, during my search for new oppertunities I've been talking with many people and the conversation usually seems to settle on just this topic. So, I dug up an old post I wrote, while acting as Product Marketing Mgr at Enterprise Mashup software company JackBe, with a diagram created by JackBe's CTO, John Crupi.

Sunday, June 3, 2007

A lot of people ask us here at JackBe about the definitions and or differences between Web 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. So here are some of my thoughts simplified for a blog post.

Web 2.0 – There are two parts to this one which will make sense when I get into the difference between Enterprise Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0.

1. Web 2.0 – the user-driven paradigm shift. Youtube, blogs, wikis, RIAs with greater self-service capabilities… all of these are examples of a paradigm shift from older HTML static, mostly one way communication of ideas and information to a new User-Driven web model which enables you and me to more easily contribute content, share information and collaborate with each other through the web.

2. Web 2.0 - technology enablers. This user-driven shift has been made possible in part by new or now accepted technologies and techniques which have gained greater penetration as web application tools. Such include: Ajax, proprietary RIA tools like Flex and Lazlo and now Silverlight, Service Orientated Architecture (SOA), Ruby on Rails and other lightweight dev models, Web Services like REST and RSS, Mashups (data and visual) and Tagging. Of course this is not an exclusive list but I think you get my point.

Enterprise Web 2.0 – the Web 2.0 technologies mentioned above put into practice in the enterprise. For example: richer, more productive customer self-service apps, inter-department collaboration through bogs, and wikis. But simply ‘slapping’ these technologies into a rooted organization will not bring about the same successes and value that Web 2.0 apps have enjoyed in the public domain. Enterprises have too many constraints and need a mind and culture shift along with deep embedment of these 2.0 tools into its processes to have any kind of a definable impact.

Enterprise 2.0 – The Enterprise 2.0 is analogous to #1 above in that it represents a user orientated paradigm shift of the enterprise makeup itself. It embraces the decentralized organization built around disparate data and information with users empowered to create new information built around and on top of others ideas through sharing, and collaboration. An organic organization loosely designed and constructed to empower knowledge workers to do what they do best by giving them what they need, when the need it and how they need it by enabling them with 2.0 technologies and nurturing this new paradigm mind set internally. Here enterprises reap the benefits of 2.0 through network effects from its user’s contributions and collaboration and realize success that increases proportionally as more users contribute to the organism creating a potentially indefinable value proposition to stakeholders.

Each of these could be expanded in much more detail but why make it more complicated as this? If you have any thoughts please feel free to share or contact me. That is after all the point.

Heidi's midterm Sanity Check

2008-02-29T11:21:00.000-05:00

New Product Marketing Oppertunities Sought

2008-02-28T10:38:00.001-05:00

That's right, I (Wagnermr14@gmail.com ) am seeking a product marketing manager or similar opportunity with a fast paced, energetic, growing internet or software company where I can contribute to the success of and continue to grow my skills and career along with. Currently I am looking to relocate myself to either Seattle or Boston.

Most recently I have served as the Product Marketing Manager at NAVTEQ, Map Network division (location-based marketing solutions), and JackBe (Web 2.0 Mashup server), where I developed strategic positioning and messaging for new, and repackaged products while translating market requirements and relaying to the development team. Regarding marketing, I drove the creation of all components of corporate & product marketing collateral, website vision and requirements, sales tools, training, and managed the marketing communications team and PR firm.

I offer a combination of young and growing company/startup entrepreneurial experience with familiarity working for large public companies. Although my experience has primarily been in b2b, my approach to product marketing is persona-based (Pragmatic Marketing) which I believe extends to direct consumer business models as well. I view both as understanding your markets needs whether business or consumer, and then positioning products to those.

SUMMARY OF QUALIFICATIONS

Product Marketing and Business Development professional with experience in creating and managing marketing, sales, and product strategies in both software and internet solution launches and partnerships. Driven, results oriented team player who is passionate about solving problems and introducing new solutions that change the way individuals work, collaborate, and socialize.

Skills: Product Strategy, Product Positioning & Messaging, Product Marketing, Sales, Business Strategy and Planning, and Business Development

Technical competency: Web 2.0 (Mashups, social collaborative networking, blogging, wikis), Enterprise applications, SOA, SaaS, Web Services, Location-based services.

EXPERIENCE

NAVTEQ Washington D.C.

8/07-12-07 Product Marketing Manager

Managed product, and corporate marketing components for NAVTEQ’s Map Network brand; a location- based marketing solution aimed at large destination and event markets. Repackaged solution to align with new company vision and revenue goals.

Achievements:

· Repackaged core offering to align and scale to management’s revenue targets

· Aided in the rebuilding of the marketing department

· Lead the website redesign requirements and online social strategy.

Role & Responsibilities:

Definition and implementation of product marketing strategy and programs
Technology packaging
Product strategy, branding, go-to-market launch plans
Sales tools eg. product demonstrations, case studies, and collateral
New product identification in response to changing market opportunities

JACKBE CORPORATION Chevy Chase, MD

11/05-8/07 Product Marketing Manager

Managed product and corporate marketing strategy and tactics for rapidly-growing venture-funded startup. Developed strategic positioning and messaging for JackBe’s Web 2.0 Mashup solution.

Achievements:

· 100% revenue growth from 2005 to 2006

· Managed go-to-market-strategy creation and execution for US markets, generating >$5 million

· Positioned JackBe as a thought leader in Enterprise Web 2.0 space leading to 33% increase in qualified leads.

· Identified product partner opportunities which resulted in richer product offerings that more closely met the needs of the target markets leading to 25% more revenue generated through partner programs.

Role & Responsibilities:

Product roadmap creation and maintenance
Positioning, messaging, packaging, and pricing
Demand generation strategies and execution
Developed promotional collateral, sales training materials, and demonstrations
Managed company-wide teams to ensure effective operations and product launches
Developed and supported of client communications
Win/loss analysis, competitive comparisons
Managed conference and strategic presentations and media interviews

PHASE2 TECHNOLOGY Alexandria, VA

3/04-10/04 MBA – Executive Management Internship

· Responsible for assisting in executing the vision of a small, growing entrepreneurial technology company

· Reviewed/refined/defined company’s market position, and message; conducted strategic market research into competitors, prospects, products, and pricing

· Identified, targeted, tracked, and contacted potential sales prospects

· Lead in updating company business plan and strategic documents

· Project management – managed disparate project teams and resources

UCLID SOFTWARE, LLC Madison, WI

5/00-07/03 Western Regional Sales & Marketing Manager

Managed the marketing, sales, and partner efforts for the Western United States. Guided the product marketing efforts including identifying new market opportunities, building out target market personas for campaigns, and go-to-market activities.

Achievements:

· Increased revenues by 10% in 2001

· Continually lead Western Region as the top revenue source region for three years

· Drove programs in region that delivered >300 qualified leads, an increase of 150%

Role and Responsibilities:

· Sales Lifecycle: Responsible for entire sales cycle including quarterly forecasting, and marketing campaigns in Western United States resulting in the most profitable territory for four consecutive quarters.

· Product Marketing: Developed strategic positioning and messaging for existing and new GIS product; drove the creation of all components of marketing collateral, sales tools, training, custom and strategic presentations for the assigned region.

· Revenue Generation: Consistently the top sales representative meeting quarterly quotas through cold calling and lead generation follow-up.

· Product Management: Worked closely with engineering to ensure new products met market needs.

· Strong Communication Skills: Attended tradeshows and presented product at market seminars resulting in largest company sale to the Bureau of Land Management, Alaska.

· Building Business Opportunities: Qualified new and managed existing resellers within territory creating a network of UCLID representatives and client training centers resulting in increased territory sales and company awareness.

EDUCATION

PRAGMATIC MARKETING – Effective Product Marketing (EPM) Course, 07

KOGOD SCHOOL OF BUSINESS, AMERICAN UNIVERSTY Washington D.C.

Master of Business Administration, December 2005

Concentration: Management of Global Information Technology

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-EAU CLAIRE Eau Claire, WI

Bachelors of Business Administration May 2000

PHI ETA SIGMA National Honor Society, President

Golden Key National Honor Society, Vice President

Concentration: Management-Entrepreneurship Program; Minor Finance

Zumobi Talks Widgets And Mobile 2.0

2007-12-03T16:55:00.000-05:00

Posted by Stephen Wellman, Nov 29, 2007 11:43 PM

A few weeks ago I sat down to discuss Mobile 2.0 with handset giant Nokia (NYSE: NOK) at Mobile Internet World. This time I wanted to deepen the conversation and cover mobile widgets with Beth Goza, Senior Marketing Manager at startup Zumobi. Guess what, widgets are key to bringing Web 2.0 to the third screen.

Google Mobile Causing an Industry War?

2007-11-09T14:01:00.000-05:00

Google’s mobile initiative, which happily confirmed this year’s rumors and officially announced itself as an open platform, is apparently starting to see the big ripple effect of its actual existence. With 34 companies lined up to take advantage of the mobile platform, the ones on the outside aren’t too happy. That would be wireless providers like Verizon and Nokia.

But considering the necessity of Google and its partners to access the Internet via their mobile devices, the question of the UHF broadcast spectrum auction has come into play. We know Google wants it, along with everybody else. And with Google’s proposed participation in the auction, it requested that the winner be required to open its airwaves to any device, application, and ISP, as well as selling access wholesale to resellers.

You may recall that Verizon wasn’t too happy with this demand by Google, and lobbied against it. The FCC didn’t listen to either company and got rid of the wholesale reselling requirement all together. Where does that leave Google? Not entirely out in the cold, and not unable to possibly still win the auction.

Google’s still the new guy on the block when it comes to a mobile OS, and it’s clearly hoping to make a grand entrance by introducing something new, for both the mobile industry in its entirety, and the market’s consumers. Google may need to win that chunk of the UHF broadcast spectrum more than any other party, and it’s willing to spend billions of dollars to get it.
by Kristen Nicole

Whatsopen.com: Google’s mobile local search effort?

2007-11-09T00:01:00.000-05:00

By Eric Eldon 11.8.07

Whatsopen is an unlaunched web and mobile local search engine — and a secret testing ground for Google’s new search offerings, a source tells us.

From screenshots we’ve been shown off-the-record, the site offers a way to search for nearby stores and their hours of operation from your phone.

Whatsopen is doing invite-only alpha testing in the US and China and will launch in late 2007, a note on the site says.

Our source says Google has been interested in purchasing the company and its search technology, and may have already purchased it and started using it as a testing ground.

We have not been able to verify any of this information with the company. Google declined to comment.

Valleywag has screenshots here (including the one, above) — obtained from a different source, our source claims.

Mobile 2.0 Start-Up Ecosystem

2007-11-08T18:51:00.000-05:00

From Digital Design Blog:
m-Trends‘ Rudy De Waele has posted his presentation on the Mobile 2.0 Start-Up Ecosystem from the Mobile Web 2.0 Conference. The presentation looks the key features being developed by mobile startups such as “harnessing collective intelligence” and “operator-independent access”. Nokia mentioned numerous times.

Mashup Startup Teqlo Shuts Down After Struggles

2007-11-08T13:56:00.000-05:00

Written by Anne Zelenka
Thursday, November 8, 2007 at 9:08 AM PT

Wow. I remember having these guys on the top of my mashup competitor watch list while as the product marketing mgr at JackBe. Slow leak in the 2.0 bubble here as GigaOM's Anne Zelenka writes. I believe so. She also continues to say what I believe is indicative of any cycle bubble when technology drives products and not market needs. Anne mentions, "Even in the best of times, many companies fail to find a match between what they’ve built and what customers want to buy.

The killer app is is anything you want it to be, except what I have found is that people just want to be told or given something rather than worrying about building something so they can then go do their job. I believe that there is great potential but some companies need to do a serious do a market need inventory to ensure or readjust their offerings are meeting real market needs.

If sales and revenues are pouring in like an open water spicket than you can say I'm wrong, but if not and you're selling more fluff than licenses, well than maybe there might be some truth to this. Just my two cents though.

Update: Rod Boothby over at Innovation Creators, a great blog if you haven't checked it out before, knows more about Teqlo than the most of us ever will and has added some more thoughts about this happening.

Techcrunch was a bit more direct: Making my point that it is hard to make money from mashups, investors have pulled the plug on Teqlo. The startup, backed by Peter Rip, was originally focused on being a widget-based tool for creating mashups, competing with Yahoo Pipes, Dapper, and OpenKapow. Then it tried to morph into a vague “Web-based workflow” company, and lost its CEO. Founder Jacoby Thwaites tells GigaOm:

We had great investors, great people and great technology, but we ran out of time working out what the killer product could be!

Time’s up, buddy. Teqlo is now in the deadpool.

New New Internet

2007-11-01T23:37:00.000-04:00

I Just got back from the New New Internet show which I also attended last year. Compared to last year, the emphasis was more on implementing web 2.0 in enterprise and other line of business constructs. Something I and the rest of the JackBe team was preaching - and JackBe still is as the leading the Enterprise Mashup thought leadership arena. I saw the demo of their Wires visual mashup composer which was still in alpha when I was there and it is slick is all I can say.

I hope to post more on a new subject - Map Based Marketing & Location Based Services - as I definitely feel location-based services will be the next area web 2.0 will penetrate. This leading into another buzzy trend - Mobile 2.0 - which really can be broken down into "Everything you need in the palm of your hand."

This is a short post but now that I'm part of Map Network, a NAVTEQ company it is an area I will be focusing more on.

The Map Network, a NAVTEQ company

2007-09-12T16:13:00.000-04:00

I know I have been silent lately. I just joined the Map Network, a NAVTEQ company as Product Marketing Manager I'm busy ramping up. I will write more later but just as with watching the web 2.0 trend at JackBe, I see an0ther long-term, location-based marketing trend emerging that leverages certain web 2.0 technologies and user-driven community concepts.

More to come later, this is just a glimpse into how I will be steering the posts I write moving forward.

Cheers,
Mike

Never Give Up

2007-08-08T22:01:00.000-04:00

American University, Kogod School of Business Alumni Facebook Group.

2007-07-25T15:19:00.000-04:00

American University, Kogod School of Business Alumni Facebook Group.
There isn't really anything else I can say; its pretty self explanatory.

Dion H. Latest Blog

2007-06-19T12:23:00.000-04:00

The Enterprise 2.0 Conference: Web 2.0 Continues Its Move To The Workplace

« H E » email

posted Tuesday, 19 June 2007

It's the second day of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference here at the Boston waterfront. Yesterday was the workshop day for the event as well as the much-ballyhooed showdown between Andrew McAfee and Tom Davenport, the original point of disagreement around the real impact of Enterprise 2.0 which I've covered before . Today the main conference sessions begin and a quick look at the show program tells you that an all-star cast of Enterprise 2.0 folks has been assembled here.

Differences in 2.0's Continued

2007-06-12T23:42:00.000-04:00

We got such good feedback from the post last week I decided to expand upon it a bit.

Differences in 2.0's Continued

Wow, we received fantastic feedback the last post Differences in 2.0's. In particular, we received emails asking for more clarification about the difference of Enterprise Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. I created a pic that I hope will help in addition to an attempt to relate Enterprise 2.0 to Ford Motor (A stretch I know but why not try)........... Click link for the whole post.

Differences of 2.0's

2007-06-03T21:58:00.000-04:00

I wrote a post on my company's blog about ... "A lot of people ask me about the definition and or differences between Web 2.0, Enterprise Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. So here are some of my thoughts simplified for a blog post." You can read the whole post at JackBe Blogs.

2007-06-01T10:03:00.000-04:00

I wanted to post a video from one of JackBe's most tech savvy Reps Mark Milligan. Mark has been recording vids on subjects such as Ajax, Enterprise Web 2.0, Portals, ect. All are on YouTube and I would reccommend taking a look. Here's one:

3 New Google Web 2.0 Releases Tomorrow

2007-05-30T20:57:00.000-04:00

New additions for google in the web 2.0 space. A offline browser plug-in aimed at making web apps work both on and offline – Similar to Adobe Apollo. Mashup Editor which is like Yahoo Pipes but more scriptic. Also a new version of GWT which has no new functionality, but they did make a lot of changes to get the source code and build scripts into presentable shape to prepare for ongoing open source development.

--------------------------

Tomorrow, Google will be hosting a developer day for 5,000 developers worldwide. The bulk of developers will be gathering at the San Jose convention center for a keynote by Google’s VP of Engineering, Jeff Huber. At the conference Google will be outlinging their their developer strategy. But the big announcement will be Google Gears, an open source browser plugin that will enable developers to create offline web applications using JavaScript APIs. As a developer, you’ll be able to make an application with the assurance that it will work offline and online across browsers.

The plugin is a 700K download for Firefox 1.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+ that installs three developer APIs. One API will handle the creation of data objects to store application information locally, another will be a SQLite relational database for searching the data, and the final part will enable asynchronous JavaScript so applications can sync data in the background without overburdening the browser. More info on the APIs are available at the gears website.

Other launches at Developer Day include a new mashup editor that competes with Microsoft PopFly and Yahoo Pipes. Google’s attempt is a little less visual than the others, but the intention is the same. Last but not least, there’s a new version of Google Web Toolkit. For devs, Christmas came way early this year.

Creating mashups with Google couldn't be easier. In a few lines of code and one click of a button you can publish your mashups for the world to see. Learn More

· Google services mashed up
Take some AJAX UI components, data from your users and Google services like Google Base and Google Maps or external feeds and mash them all together using our simple framework. We make it easy with the Google Mashup Editor.

· Common web technologies doing uncommon things
The Google Mashup Editor allows you to use HTML, Javascript, CSS and XML to create an infinite variety of applications with technology you are familiar with.

· Simple tools for sophisticated apps
Using the Google Mashup Editor you can create, debug and deploy your application in one interface.

Take a tour of the Google Mashup Editor »

The Force 2.0: 'Star Wars' site launches video mashups

2007-05-25T15:39:00.000-04:00

Even George Lucas is mashing.

The Force 2.0: 'Star Wars' site launches video mashups

On Friday, 30 years to the day after the first Star Wars hit theaters, the film's official Web site, StarWars.com, will relaunch with a new design. One of the hallmarks of the new site is a feature that invites fans to remix video and music clips from all six Star Wars movies, as well as add in their own homemade videos. They'll then be able to share them on the Star Wars site with other fans, as well as embed them in their blogs or profiles on social-networking sites.

Licensed remix tools have become popular promotional campaigns in recent months: not only are they essentially free advertising, but they also allow fans to play around with video and audio footage with a reduced potential for copyright infringement lawsuits. The remixing platform for the Star Wars Web site was created by Eyespot, which has also created remix tools for a number of pop singers, comedian Stephen Colbert, and the Broadway musical Spring Awakening.

But the new video-centric Star Wars site goes beyond mashups. Additionally, StarWars.com--operated by Lucas Online, a division of Star Wars parent company Lucasfilm--will be adding a library of hundreds of Star Wars-related video clips. These include official documentary-style videos, selections from the Star Wars Fan Movie Festival over the years, and user-generated videos inspired by Star Wars like the "Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager" Web sitcom. Created by Matt Sloann and Aaron Yonda, "Chad Vader" imagines what would happen if Darth Vader had a less successful younger brother who worked in a grocery store.

In a press release Thursday, Eyespot also hinted that StarWars.com will be rolling out more multimedia features over the coming months, including more games and social-networking features.

[This post is from CNET News.com]

China Natural Gas Update

2007-05-17T21:10:00.000-04:00

I mentioned China Natural Gas and it seems the company is delivering on what it promised. For me its my energy play in an energy constrained populas and growing country...

China Natural Gas Reports First Quarter 2007 Financial Results
Tuesday May 15, 4:38 pm ET

Net Income Up 414% to $2.1 Million

NEW YORK, May 15 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- China Natural Gas, Inc. (OTC BB: CHNG - News), one of the leading providers of pipeline natural gas for industrial, commercial and residential use and compressed natural gas (CNG) for vehicular fuel in Xi'an, China, today announced its first quarter financial results for the period ended March 31, 2007.

    Financial Highlights for the First Quarter 2007:

   - Revenue increased 277% year over year to $6.7 million
   - Gross profit increased 272% year over year to $3.5 million
   - Income from operations increased 421% year over year to $2.5 million
   - Net income increased 414% year over year to $2.1 million
   - Net income per share increased to $0.09 per share compared to $0.02 in
     the prior year period

Enterprise Mashups

2007-05-16T22:33:00.000-04:00

Deepak Alur of JackBe has a great post on the question a lot of us or asking "what exactely is a mashup?" He was recently at the Mashup Ecosystem Summit organized by IBM and recaps some thoughts on the subject of his and others.

[I was at the Mashup Ecosystem Summit organized by IBM at their offices in San Francisco last week. Our CTO, John Crupi, and our Chief Architect, Raj Krishnamurthy, also attended with me. It was an interesting mix of people from different backgrounds and companies all converging on the concept of Mashups. Jeff Nolan (ex-Teqlo, ex-SAP) gave an interesting talk about his experiences in a starting up a mashup company. Some notable points were: (lack of) availability of APIs; Do-it-yourself Data Formats; Performance can be a challenge; Need for strong visual composition tools; Lack of Standards. I think these are questions that this group will be able to tackle over time. (At least, I hope!)]
Read the full post here.

Tacit Workers

2007-05-10T10:51:00.000-04:00

As "tacit" interactions replace more routine business activities and the scale and complexity of many corporations creep upward, the need to manage collaboration is growing. According to McKinsey, nearly 80 percent of the senior executives surveyed in a 2005 study said that effective coordination across product, functional, and geographic lines was crucial for growth. Yet only 25 percent of the respondents described their organizations as "effective" at sharing knowledge across boundaries. Read the rest of my company post here:
http://jackbe.blogspot.com/2007/05/tacit-workers.html

Is RSS Ready for the Enterprise?

2007-05-06T16:38:00.000-04:00

Mike’s take: Again, we see here the benefit to enterprises as being that of time. Wasted time that is. Time spent searching for the information one knows they need. RSS like other services, can be predefined to present the information one wants, when they want it, and how they want it. All leading to reduced time and costs employees incure attempting to do their job better.

Is RSS Ready for the Enterprise?

Yuval Tarsi

http://www.sandhill.com/opinion/daily_blog.php?id=45

Apr. 30, 2007
RSS is a format for syndicating news and content from Web sites such as media outlets, community sites and Weblogs. Recently, RSS has been extended beyond news and this trend hasn’t escaped the corporate world. Now, companies routinely use RSS to inform customers about new offerings and products. The next natural step forward is to provide employees with changes to enterprise application data using RSS.

The main challenges to using RSS in the enterprise include ensuring appropriate data security, providing requisite scalability, conforming to existing security and access policies and making sure that solutions don’t introduce additional security layers to administer. In short, delivering secure RSS in the enterprise is fraught with dangers and pitfalls.

Let’s examine the challenges faced delivering enterprise data to today’s information workers through secure RSS.

RSS in the Consumer World
Consumers subscribe to RSS on news sites for local weather and company stock prices. After subscribing to feeds, users periodically receive updates viewed with RSS "readers.”

Several popular RSS products view RSS feeds:

Web Aggregators – RSS-aggregating services provided to consumers over the Web by third parties. Consumers access Web aggregators using a Web browser, such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer or Firefox. Web aggregators serve as intermediaries between feed consumers – or browsers – and feed servers.
Desktop RSS Readers – Consumers download software programs called desktop RSS readers that are able to receive, store and render RSS feeds.
Web Aggregator Gadgets – One variant of a Web aggregator is a software tool deployed as a Web "gadget" (or widget). These run within consumer browsers.

RSS in the Enterprise World
The convenience of RSS hasn’t escaped business and IT professionals. It introduces a new way to access enterprise data and potentially revolutionize information sharing between employees, partners and customers. Most importantly, RSS allows workers to customize their own workplace computing experience, enabling them to create personalized applications for specific organizational needs.

Real-world examples include:

Support managers subscribing to CRM updates that track high priority cases
Salespeople subscribing to CRM and ERP application updates that track key customers' sales orders and support histories
Sales managers receiving automatic updates on high-value sales leads with high closure potential
Product managers subscribing to SFA application updates that track uptake of new products or modules

This information is already accessible to organization employees, however, workers often waste hours searching and retrieving the data they need.

RSS increases worker productivity by radically changing how they consume critical data. Through personalized RSS feeds, workers can focus on the job at hand, rather than searching for information.

Micropayments After All: S3, iTunes, Adsense and more

2007-05-02T19:18:00.000-04:00

I work for JackBe as the Product Marketing Manager and this post caught my eye. Internally, we have talked for awile about use cases for our Presto Enterprise Web 2.0 Edge server component. I think this case is one. Edge lowers the transactional cost of entry barrier making micropayments that much more a reality. Edge allows enterprises to finally expose valuable intellectual property previously trapped behind the firewall for governed consumption by employees, end customers, or partners.

Tim O'Reilly

Micropayments After All: S3, iTunes, Adsense and more

Andrew Savikas made an interesting comment on the Radar backchannel that seemed sharing more widely:

I remember a few years ago when there was a ton of buzz about micropayments being the future of ecommerce, followed by a backlash on how micropayments were a horrible idea, and would never overcome the transactional costs. In the meantime, iTunes and S3 (among others) have quietly been building great businesses on top of micropayments -- I think one important difference is that originally people thought of micropayments as paying small amounts to many different people, vs. paying incrementally to the same person/business.

Andrew's comment was sparked by Amazon's announcement of new S3 pricing:

With Amazon S3 recently celebrating its one year birthday, we took an in-depth look at how developers were using the service, and explored whether there were opportunities to further lower costs for our customers. The primary area our customers had asked us to investigate was whether we could charge less for bandwidth....

Sara Milstein noted that Google Adsense could also be conceived of as a micropayments system, this one in the more traditional sense of allocating small payments to many players. And of course, Amazon's Associates program is also a micropayments system, as are many cell phone billing systems. How many others of these are there out there? If you use micropayments in your site or application, let us know.

Amazon's full pricing announcement sent out in email appears below.

This is a note to inform you about some changes we're making to our pricing, effective June 1, 2007.

There are two primary costs associated with uploading and downloading files: the cost of the bandwidth itself, and the fixed cost of processing a request. Consistent with our cost-following pricing philosophy, we determined that the best solution for our customers, overall, is to equitably charge for the resources being used - and therefore disaggregate request costs from bandwidth costs.

Making this change will allow us to offer lower bandwidth rates for all of our customers. In addition, we're implementing volume pricing for bandwidth, so that as our customers' businesses grow and help us achieve further economies of scale, they benefit by receiving even lower bandwidth rates. Finally, this means that we will be introducing a small request-based charge for each time a request is made to the service. Below are the details of the new pricing plan (also available at http://aws.amazon.com/s3):

Current bandwidth price (through May 31, 2007)
$0.20 / GB - uploaded
$0.20 / GB - downloaded

New bandwidth price (effective June 1, 2007)
$0.10 per GB - all data uploaded

$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data downloaded
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data downloaded
$0.13 per GB - data downloaded / month over 50 TB
Data transferred between Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 will remain free of charge

New request-based price (effective June 1, 2007)
$0.01 per 1,000 PUT or LIST requests
$0.01 per 10,000 GET and all other requests*
* No charge for delete requests

Storage will continue to be charged at $0.15 / GB-month used.

The end result is an overall price reduction for the vast majority of our customers. If this new pricing had been applied to customers' March 2007 usage, 75% of Amazon S3 customers would have seen their bill decrease, while an additional 11% would have seen an increase of less than 10%. Only 14% of customers would have experienced an increase of greater than 10%.

We don't anticipate making further structural changes to Amazon S3 pricing in the future, but we will continue to look for ways to drive down costs and pass the savings on to you.

China Natural Gas Announces Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2006 Financial Results

2007-04-17T18:36:00.000-04:00

NEW YORK, April 17 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- China Natural Gas, Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: CHNG - News), one of the leading providers of pipeline natural gas for industrial, commercial and residential use and compressed natural gas (CNG) for vehicular fuel in Xi'an, China, today announced its fourth quarter and full year financial results for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2006.

    Financial Highlights for the Fourth Quarter 2006:
  -- Revenue increased 218% to $6.8 million, driven by the
     construction of an additional 14 CNG filling stations
     in the Xian area in 2006 and
     continued growth of pipeline customers;
  -- Gross profit up 189% to $3.3 million;
  -- Income from operations increased 286% to $2.3 million;
  -- Net income increased 271% to $2.1 million; and
  -- Net income per diluted share increased 304% to $0.08
     per share.

"We are very pleased with our performance through the fourth quarter of 2006, which exceeded our expectations by all measures," stated Mr. Qinan Ji, Chairman and CEO of China Natural Gas.

    Financial Highlights for Fiscal Year 2006:
  -- Revenues increased 288% to $18.8 million;
  -- Gross profit grew 272% to $9.1 million;
  -- Income from operations increased 343% to $6.5
 million; and
  -- Net income increased 310% to $6.1 million or
 $0.23 per share.

"We made great progress expanding our business in 2006, ending the year with seventeen CNG filling stations and 75,000 residential, commercial and industrial pipeline customers. I'd like to thank all of our employees for their outstanding effort," said Mr. Qinan Ji, Chairman and CEO of China Natural Gas. "As the sole authorized provider of pipeline natural gas to customers in our service area, and with 15 new company-owned filling stations slated to begin construction by the end of 2007, we are truly in a unique and enviable competitive position."

Revenue for fiscal year 2006 increased 288% to $18.8 million from $4.9 million for fiscal year 2005. The sharp increase in revenue was due primarily to the contribution of 14 newly constructed CNG filling stations during 2006 and a material increase in the number of residential, industrial and commercial pipeline customers compared to 2005. Revenue from sales of natural gas increased 713% to $13.7 million from $1.7 million in the prior year. Construction and installation revenue increased 62% to $5.1 million from $3.2 million in the fiscal year 2005.

Gross profit for fiscal year 2006 increased 272% to $9.1 million from $2.5 million in 2005. Gross margin decreased 200 basis points to 48.4% from 50.4% in the year 2005, reflecting the significant increase in revenues generated from company-owned CNG filling stations, which generate a lower gross margin than installation and construction revenue. While the Company's overall gross margin declined year over year, gross margin for sales of natural gas, excluding construction and installation revenue, increased to 44.1% from 23.3% in the prior year. Management believes that sales of CNG through its filling stations provide the best opportunity for future revenue and profit growth.

Operating expenses in fiscal year 2006 increased 166% to $2.6 million from $1.0 million, reflecting the construction and operation of 14 new natural gas filling stations during the year, as well as continued expenses related to the identification of future natural gas filling station locations and costs associated with the government licensing and approval process. As a percent of revenue, operating expenses decreased to 13.8% in 2006 from 20.1% in 2005. Operating income increased 343% to $6.5 million from $1.5 million. Operating margin increased substantially by 430 basis points to 34.6% compared to 30.3% in the prior year.

Net income for fiscal year 2006 increased 310% to $6.1 million, or $0.23 per share, compare to $1.5 million, or $0.08 per share, in the fiscal year 2005.

Balance Sheet

As of December 31, 2006, the Company had $5.3 million cash and cash equivalents on hand compared to $675,000 at December 31, 2005.

Fiscal Year 2007 Update

The Company expects to add up to 30,000 new pipeline customers by the end of 2007. Additionally, the Company expects to start construction of an additional 15 CNG filling stations through the remainder of the year.

BungeeLabs, Sneaking Out of Stealth

2007-04-16T22:22:00.000-04:00

BungeeLabs, Sneaking Out of Stealth

April 16, 2007 — 05:56 AM PDT — by Pete Cashmore

Also at the Web 2.0 Expo: Bungee Labs, which is starting to drop hints about its Bungee Connect product.

Connect is a “100% on-demand web development and deployment environment” that launches in May. So what is it? Without going too deep into dev speak, it’s an IDE (integrated development environment) for building rich Ajax web apps. Among its strengths: automated support for the integration of SOAP and REST-based web services and the ability to deploy apps without using FTP (apps are deployed through the browser). They’re working with Amazon, Ebay, Google, Windows Live, PayPal, RealNetworks, Salesforce.com, Yahoo and more to make sure Bungee Connect works with all their web services (read: lots of mashable APIs).

For those who haven’t touched a line of code, that might not mean much, but those who have should look out for further details and the launch in May.

The Fifth Level of Ajax

2007-04-12T23:20:00.000-04:00

We are watching the evolution of web2.0 unfold in front of us and I believe it will eventually evolve into a web cloud of information and data for Users to search, gather, and remix to meet their needs. Whether it be personal or in the enterprise construct. This second location though requires an environment that delivers these user driven capabilities but still adheres to enterprise IT regulations.

Our CTO John Crupi recently described and blog on JackBe's corp blog about what he is seeing as a 5th level to Gartner's Levels of Ajax which is part of this story.

I think that all Ajax vendors have been touting the benefits of 'improved user experience' as their value proposition for a while. The problem with this proposition is that it is very hard to quantify.

But, they are missing something. It isn't just about the "experience" but about empowering the user with a better view and access to any data source. Consider the "Four Levels of Ajax Adoption" from Ray Valdez at Gartner. Ray has said that the levels are:

Snippets
Widgets
Client Framework
Client-Server Framework

I think Ray is missing the next level. The 5th level should be 'User-driven Framework', a framework that has all of the benefits of level 4 but allows the user to be the one pulling and mashing any information that exists in the enterprise, the trusted partner's enterprise and the Web. This may seem to be a small difference, but in reality it is the difference between 'improved user experience' and 'improved access to information which gives the true competitive advantage'. And to most business users, that's an important distinction.

So, we suggest the 'Five Levels of Ajax Adoption' :

Snippets
Widgets
Client Framework
Client-Server Framework
User-Driven Framework

JackBe has embraced this idea through its new products, Dash, our dynamic interface for user-driven mashups, and Edge, our virtualization and mashup server. This is an emerging area and one we'll be talking about a lot in 2007.

New SalesForce.com Service is Yet Another Web 2.0 Proof Point

2007-04-12T23:11:00.000-04:00

From my JackBe corp. blog....

Read/Write Web reported yesterday that 'Salesforce.com Brings Web 2.0 To The Enterprise With ContentExchange': Today Salesforce.com announced a new product called Salesforce ContentExchange, a content management product for unstructured data such as email and html. They also publicly announced the acquisition of Koral, a web 2.0 content collaboration platform that was at DEMO07 earlier this year... Koral is a key enabling technology for Salesforce ContentExchange. The new product means that Salesforce.com now manages all types of content in a company - both structured information (e.g. CRM data like contacts and sales information) and unstructured information (office documents, HTML, video/audio files and email, etc). Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, calls this “another step towards our vision of managing all information on demand”.

So far, Web 2.0 migration into the enterprise world has seemed largely been limited to the notion of enhanced content creation and sharing – for example, using a blog to add a human touch to a vendor/customer or management/employee relationship. Another example is using a wiki to create central repositories of information to which any employee can contribute, thereby exposing previously hidden but useful information. Both blogs and wikis are certainly '2.0' types of tools, and as such they are useful for sharing unstructured information associated with projects and processes. But they do nothing for structured information retrieval.

I think the SalesForce.com ContentExchange nicely reinforces what we at JackBe have been talking about for many months: a new level of ‘2.0 collaboration’ that empowers employees to share, access and interact with disparate information and data, both structured and unstructured. Check out the graph, stolen from one of our sales pitches, for an example. I think it's about delivering on the original promises of what Portals were aimed to do (but largely didn't do), and all in a 100% user-driven way.

Most business and knowledge worker tasks rely on access to the appropriate structured data in real, or near-real time. These information pieces are spread out across many enterprise applications, and databases. We as information workers are trapped in a world of monolithic siloed applications, each with its own login and password, access control policies, and confusing and user interfaces. Furthermore, because information is stored in different locations, the relation between the data is not obvious, and is usually only well understood by the information worker himself. It appears that SalesForce.com aims to change all that.

And, of course, JackBe's own Presto offers considerable efficiency potentials to the enterprise by presenting a user-driven consolidated view to both this disparate unstructured and structured information so to better respond to tacit activities. We think Presto will essentially redefine how information is located, consumed, and remixed as seen fit in the enterprise. Presto provides user insight and control of all accessible/governed information the knowledge worker needs to better respond to events. But enuf about my stuff for now.

Clean Energy China Stock Pick - CHNG

2007-04-05T21:01:00.000-04:00

Based in the city of Xian in China’s north-central province of Shaanxi, China Natural Gas distributes natural gas (to approximately 50,000 households, as well as commercial buildings) and compressed natural gas (CNG) (to CNG wholesales and retail automobile filling stations). Recently CHNG has introduced its own network of retail filling stations to sell CNG directly to consumers—by the end of 2006, CHNG operated 17 filling stations in or near Xian. The company also owns a 70-mile high pressure gas pipeline, which connects CHNG’s distribution

network to the government-owned high-pressure pipeline serving the province. In 2007, CHNG plans to construct its own liquid natural gas plant, which will allow the company to expand the geographic market it serves. CHNG came public in the US via a reverse merger in December 2005. Although CNG currently represents only about three percent of China’s energy consumption, it is becoming an increasingly important source of fuel in the PRC. CNG is the cleanest burning fossil fuel (reducing the environmental impact of the increasing use of internal combustion vehicles in China), China has significant domestic natural gas resources (reducing the need for imported fuels) and CNG costs less per unit of energy content than gasoline or diesel fuel. The Chinese government is actively encouraging increased use of CNG via various incentives for CNG-related exploration and infrastructure development, which, combined with CNG’s other attributes, will likely lead to increased demand for CNG for the foreseeable future. (Because CNG is less expensive than either gasoline or diesel, drivers of dual-fuel vehicles will likely use CNG unless only gasoline or diesel are available in the area they are traveling in.) CHNG plans to fill the current gap between demand for CNG and retail supply in Xian by continuing to build its own CNG filling stations (at a cost of approximately US$600,000

each), while at the same time providing gas to filling stations owned by its competitors.

CHNG is focusing on expanding its retail CNG filling stations network because this business offers higher gross profit margins (approximately 39 percent) compared to the gross profit margin of the residential natural gas business (approximately 18 percent). As of the end of 2006, CHNG owned 23 filling stations (including six still under construction, all of which dispense CNG), with plans to have a total of 30 stations in operation by the end of 2007. Due to the fact that wholesale and retail CNG prices (and, therefore, gross profit margins) are set by the Chinese government, the key to increasing revenues and profits in the CNG business will be continuing expansion

of gas volume sold via increasing the size of the company's retail and/or wholesale distribution networks. CHNG is also working on expanding its facilities to include processing liquefied natural gas (LNG), which can be transported via trucks (rather than pipelines), allowing the company to increase the geographic size of its market. Management expects construction of the LNG plant will require $19 million in additional capital once the plant is approved by provincial and city government regulators.

As of August 2006, CHNG has 23.9 million shares outstanding. The company’s chairman owns approximately 25 percent of CHNG’s common shares; CHNG’s CEO owns nine percent. Approximately six percent of CHNG’s shares are held by institutions. For the quarter ending, September 30, 2006, CHNG received 80 percent of its revenues from the sale of natural

gas, of which 93 percent was sales to competitors’ CNG filling stations and seven percent was to household and wholesale consumers. The remaining 20 percent of revenues were related to CHNG’s construction of natural gas pipelines. (In China, customers have to pay approximately 60 percent of the construction cost of new pipelines upfront; the remainder is included in future monthly natural gas charges.) For the quarter ending September 30, 2006, CHNG reported net income of $2.5 million on revenues of $6.5 million, which represented year-on-year growth of 520 percent and 368 percent, respectively. Fully-diluted earnings per share increase 350 percent (to $0.09 per share). CHNG has a very strong balance sheet with $5.0 million in cash and total assets of $25.6 million. The company has a current ratio of 4.9 X, no long term debt and stockholders

equity of $23.4 million.

Industry: Energy

OTC—BB : CHNG

Sector: Natural Gas Distributor

3/26/07

What will the new spring crop yield?

2007-04-05T00:30:00.000-04:00

Posted by Susan Scrupski on April 4th, 2007

I’ve been taking a lot of satisfaction these past few weeks in how our little enterprise 2.0 garden is growing. In the past few weeks I’ve been asked to podcast, to appear on a video segment, and to participate in an enterprise 2.0 “rave.” All good stuff. The analyst and media coverage of enterprise 2.0 has really started to pick up too. I’m particularly encouraged by the management findings and recommendations we’ve seen coming out of MIT’s Sloan Management Report and McKinsey. I guess they legitimize our inner-circle zealot ramblings.

A few items of interest: I attended Ajax World a couple weeks ago. I listened to a few of the speakers, but spent more time trolling the vendors in the exhibit hall for real examples of how Ajax solutions were generating real business advantages for their customers. Nexaweb had some interesting case studies. They quickly rattled off projects at Bank of Toyko, Mitsubishi, Seimans, AFLAC and EMC where companies had built rich Internet applications that were making a difference in their markets. Another interesting observation was a casual chat I had with Chris Warner at JackBe. He basically told me the audience makeup is different this year. That it was not so much developers in jeans and ponytails asking technical questions, but guys in Polo shirts and khakis asking how to solve a business problem. He said, “When suits start walking around, we’ll know the market has matured.”

I ran into Dion Hinchcliffe in the lounge. Dion and Jeremy Geelan had kindly asked me to participate in their ground-breaking Enterprise 2.0 premier web TV segment. Unfortunately, I had to decline, but look forward to future episodes. Don’t miss the first episode, airing Monday, April 9.

Here is Dion’s description of the show:

The Enterprise 2.0 TV Show Airs Web-Wide This April from the Reuters TV Studio in Times Square

We’ve teamed up with former BBC producer Jeremy Geelan — and IT industry maven extraordinaire — to create a new world-class Web-based TV show with broadcast quality production values that obsessively covers the rapidly emerging topic of current industry fascination: Enterprise 2.0. Taped in leading venues throughout the country, the Enterprise 2.0 TV Show is designed as an open, freely-distributable communication stream created to tap the exploding popularity and delivery models of the online video medium. The show is carefully crafted to help non-technical business leaders explore the power and potential of the very latest industry developments on the Internet. Each show delves into the most important new trends that are helping reshape the face of the enterprise today and have the potential to unleash significant productivity gains and competitive advantage. Episode #1, a deep dive into the moving parts of Enterprise 2.0, has already been taped with industry leaders such as SocialText, Kapow, Jubii, and Near-Time and will be ‘airing’ in April on the show site as well as everywhere else on the Web. Also, if you are interested in appearing on the show or want to advertise or sponsor, please contact Jeremy directly.

I first started writing about what we now call “Enterprise 2.0″ the end of June, last year. I believe it was about this time last year that McAfee published his seminal, “Enterprise 2.0: the Dawn of Emergent Collaboration.” Now, barely a year later, we’ve got our own T.V. show and we’re hosting Rave parties (more to come on that). I’m looking forward to harvesting the rewards of this year’s crop. It’s fun blogging history in the making.

Posted in Next Net, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Mashups, Irregulars, Office 2.0, SaaS, blogs, Wikis, SOA, AJAX | No Comments »

Enterprise Web 2.0 Facebook Group

2007-03-29T15:42:00.000-04:00

I think the title pretty much says it all.
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2228219053

SOA Report: IONA Adds Active Governance

2007-03-27T10:27:00.000-04:00

3/26/2007

By Kurt Mackie

Companies providing service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions for the enterprise issued announcements about new products, partnerships and deals last week. Here are some of them to date.

IONA Technologies has a new version of its SOA infrastructure suite with active governance capabilities. Its Artix Registry/Repository product manages policies and provides a complete record of services in distributed SOA environments. Global 2000 customers can use the product for the capture and discovery of critical information, service network provisioning, schema validation, and visual service management.

Wily Technology has extended its enterprise application management solution to automatically identify dependencies among Web services and monitor business processes on a 24 x 7 basis. The Wily SOA Manager product works with the Wily Introscope solution on platforms such as Apache Axis, BEA WebLogic Server, IBM WebSphere Application Server, NetWeaver and Microsoft .NET.

JackBe Corp. has partnered with SOA Software and is offering a governance, management and security solution to users of AJAX and SOA services. The joint solution combines JackBe's Presto Enterprise Web 2.0 Infrastructure Platform with SOA Software's Infrastructure Suite.

Stock pick of the week - Mobl.ob

2007-03-25T23:16:00.000-04:00

Not for the risk averse, but the stock has been beaten down to the levels where it is hard for those risk takers not to pick up some shares at all time lows.

LAS VEGAS, MIAMI, and BETHESDA, Md., March 19 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- ProGames Network, a subsidiary of broadband telecommunications services company MobilePro Corp. (OTC Bulletin Board: MOBL - News), announced today that Frank Catania, one of the world's leading experts regarding on-line gaming, has agreed to join the board of directors of The Winning Edge (OTC Bulletin Board: WNED - News) upon the completion of its merger with ProGames Network. The transaction is currently expected to close in late April.

Bush Announces Iraq Exit Strategy: 'We'll Go Through Iran'

2007-03-25T23:13:00.000-04:00

by The Onion

WASHINGTON, DC—Almost a year after the cessation of major combat and a month after the nation's first free democratic elections, President Bush unveiled the coalition forces' strategy for exiting Iraq.

Enlarge Image

Bush announces the pullout of Iraq through Iran.

"I'm pleased to announce that the Department of Defense and I have formulated a plan for a speedy withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq," Bush announced Monday morning. "We'll just go through Iran."

Bush said the U.S. Army, which deposed Iran's longtime enemy Saddam Hussein, should be welcomed with open arms by the Islamic-fundamentalist state.

"And Iran's so nearby," Bush said. "It's only a hop, skip, and a jump to the east."

According to White House officials, coalition air units will leave forward air bases in Iraq and transport munitions to undisclosed locations in Iran. After 72 to 96 hours of aerial-bomb retreats, armored-cavalry units will retreat across the Zagros mountains in tanks, armored personnel carriers, and strike helicopters. The balance of the 120,000 troops will exit into the oil-rich borderlands around the Shatt-al-Arab region within 30 days.

Pentagon sources said U.S. Central Command has been formulating the exit plan under guidelines set by Bush.

Enlarge Image

"The fact is, we've accomplished our goals in Iraq," said General George Casey, the commander of coalition forces in the Iraqi theater. "Now, it's time to bring our men and women home—via Iran."

Questions have been raised about the unprecedented size of the withdrawal budget.

"I'm asking Congress to approve a $187-billion budget to enable us to exit as smoothly as possible," said Casey, whose budget request includes several hundred additional M1A1 Abrams battle tanks, 72 new C-130 cargo planes, and two brigades of artillery. "We're concerned about the safety of our troops, so we need to have the capacity to deal with insurgent forces all the way from the Iraqi border through to Tehran."

Casey has requested a budget increase for the Pentagon, so that the government can reward recruits who serve in the U.S. mission to exit Iraq.

Enlarge Image

Some of the Iranian citizens U.S. troops will meet as they pass through Iran.

"The plan also includes a minor stopover for refueling and provisional replenishment in Syria," Casey said. "But I don't expect we'll need more than 50,000 additional troops for that stretch of the Iraq pullout."

Bush's plan has met with widespread support.

"The people who said Iraq was a quagmire and that the president would never get our troops out are now eating crow," said Sean Hannity on his popular radio show Tuesday. "Of course, I don't expect anyone will have the honor to come forward and actually admit that they were wrong to question our commander-in-chief."

Sioux Falls, SD's Dianne Haverbuck, who has two sons in the military, said she was pleased to hear of the impending exit.

"Don and Kenneth have already been in Iraq an extra four months, so it's so good to hear that they'll finally be leaving that dangerous place," Haverbuck said. "I can't tell you how happy I was when the president said—what was it? I wrote it down. 'Getting our troops out of the Middle East and back home to their families is a viable long-term goal.'"

"I can't wait to see the boys," Haverbuck added.

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Hoseini-Khamenei welcomed the exit plan.

"Let the Allied armies come to Iran," Khamenei said. "I believe I can assure you that, if they do withdraw here, their brothers-in-arms in the Islamic Republican Army, the Revolutionary Guards Corps, the Quds special forces units, and the Basij Popular Mobilization Army will no doubt do everything they can to make the troops' trip back home memorable."

Genaera Corporation Announces 2006 Financial Results

2007-03-24T15:49:00.000-04:00

PLYMOUTH MEETING, Pa., March 14 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Genaera Corporation (Nasdaq: GENR - News) today announced its financial results for the year and quarter ended December 31, 2006. The net loss for the year ended December 31, 2006 was $21.2 million, or $(0.24) per share basic and diluted, as compared to a net loss of $26.4 million, or $(0.44) per share basic and diluted, for the year ended December 31, 2005. The net loss for the quarter ended December 31, 2006 was $3.6 million, or $(0.03) per share basic and diluted, as compared to a net loss of $7.8 million, or $(0.11) per share basic and diluted, for the quarter ended December 31, 2005. The loss from operations for the year and quarter ended December 31, 2006 was $22.8 million and $4.0 million, respectively, as compared to $27.2 million and $8.2 million for the same periods in 2005.

REA is to RIA, as Enterprise Web 2.0 is to Web 2.0 Returns

2007-03-05T16:02:00.000-05:00

http://jackbe.blogspot.com/

I posted this a little while back, and the thoughts were expanded by our CTO, John Crupi in TechNewsWorld. Rich Enterprise Applications enable developers to create new situational applications that can offer improved usability and flexibility for the end user, and can deliver them faster than was possible using traditional approaches. This can empower users to easily assemble situational applications in response to rapid changing business requirements. Click the link to read the full article.

2007 is the year enterprises will start to more aggresively push for ways to realize the benefits of the Web 2.0 paragim shift and bring these efficiencies into the enterprise construct. In short, to empower users to consume, compose, and collaborate in ways that still adhere to enterprise standards and requirements.

Original post.....
[Tuesday, October 03, 2006

REA is to RIA, as Enterprise Web 2.0 is to Web 2.0

MikeWagner
JackBe coined the term Rich Enterprise Applications (REA) as an evolution of Rich Internet Applications (RIA). RIA is to Web-grade applications as REA is to Enterprise-grade applications. The side pic. is my personal attempt to illustrate this visually. Some like it; some don’t, so comments are more than welcomed.
So What is Enterprise Grade?

Enterprises require tighter control, security, and reliability. In short they require a degree of governance that the average user building a Google Maps Mashup while sitting at their kitchen table doesn’t need. This should be no surprise to anyone who has worked for large organizations.

People have heard a lot about Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 lately. I can see a similarity here that I think might help to distinguish between these two, and REA and RIA. Most of the talk surrounding Web 2.0 has been focused on the social collaborative aspects that it brings to users. I agree with this. Now take all of this (Web 2.0) and enable governance and security and commercial-grade reliability and you have a Web 2.0 model that is fit for an enterprise (Enterprise 2.0)

Following the same logic let’s look at RIA and REA. RIA has brought enhanced desktop-like look and feel to web applications. It looks, feels, and from a user perspective, performs a lot better than some we-based apps of only a few years ago. Let me clarify that this richness is all done in the browser which is perfectly fine for all of the Real estate mashups popping up everyday. You know the ones with balloons imprinted over a map. I like them; nothing wrong with them. It puts the control and build in the hands of the users; they can do what they want as long as they have access to the services which when these are exposed to the client means anything.

Hopefully, maybe you can see where I’m going with this. Enterprises want to encourage this new Web 2.0 movement within the organization to leverage the network effect and value it brings, but because of what I mentioned earlier, organizations have to impose a slightly different model called Enterprise 2.0. Given this, and Enterprise 2.0 requirements, RIA needs added capabilities forreal Enterprise 2.0 grade applications. They need the richness of RIA but with the governance that Enterprise 2.0 mandates. Boom, we have Rich Enterprise Applications that extend the attribute of RIA past the client and into the Enterprise’s resources and enterprises can feel comfortable in doing this because REA has this added governance portion.
posted by Mike Wagner]

Log on to www.sify.com for Comprehensive Information & Analysis of Budget 2007

2007-03-03T13:44:00.000-05:00

Watch Live Video Streaming of the Analysis of the Budget by Experts CHENNAI, India--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sify Limited (Nasdaq:SIFY - News), a leader in Consumer Internet and Enterprise Services in India with global delivery capabilities, announced its comprehensive coverage of Budget 2007 on its portal www.sify.com. In addition, on February 28, 2007, users can log on to Sify.com to watch the live video streaming of the analysis of the Budget by experts including CRISIL.

Sify.com's Budget special is aimed at ensuring that its users can easily understand the Budget and its impact on their daily lives. Besides the comprehensive overview, the portal provides a unique service wherein users can opt for personalized mailers based on their preference for topics that directly impact them. Users can also have their concerns and queries on topics like Personal Finance, Stock Market etc. addressed by noted experts like A.N. Shanbhag, Dhirendra Kumar etc. through webchats and can also interact through Message Boards and polls.

Good Green Investment oppertunity in China of all places.

2007-03-02T14:22:00.000-05:00

ABOUT CHINA NATURAL GAS, INC.:

China Natural Gas, Inc. (website: www.naturalgaschina.com) is a US Delaware registered public company that owns and operates its natural gas related businesses in China. China Natural Gas is the first China based natural gas company publicly traded in the US capital markets (stock symbol: CHNG). Managed by seasoned industry executives, the Company owns a 120 kilometer long Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) pipeline located in the city of Xi'An (Population 8.5 million), the capital city of China's Shaanxi Province and a gateway to China's vast western regions. The northern region of Shaanxi Province is the home to China's second largest natural gas reserve. The Company has been consistently profitable since its inception.

Top Secret: DIA embraces Web 2.0

2007-02-23T10:26:00.000-05:00

February 23, 2007 (Computerworld) -- The U.S. Department of Defense's lead intelligence agency is using wikis, blogs, RSS feeds and enterprise "mashups" to help its analysts collaborate better when sifting through data used to support military operations.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is seeing "mushrooming" use of these various Web 2.0 technologies that are becoming critical to accomplishing missions that require intelligence sharing among analysts, said Lewis Shepherd, chief of DIA's Requirements and Research Group at the Pentagon.

The tools are helping DIA meet the directives set by the 9/11 Commission and other entities for intelligence agencies to "improve and deepen our collaborative work processes," he said.

DIA first launched a wiki it dubbed Intellipedia in 2004 on the Defense Department's Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS), a top-secret network that links all the government's intelligence agencies.

"The collaboration potential of the social software side is really being thoroughly vetted and is now rapidly being adopted," Shepherd said. "Across agencies, wikis and blogs are becoming as ubiquitous as e-mail in terms of information sharing."

Although the agency's mission of providing intelligence to support military planning and weapons acquisition could easily fit into any spy novel or Hollywood blockbuster, Shepherd said DIA's analysts are similar to workers in other industries in that "they rely upon and demand instant gratification" for their information needs.

"One of the virtues of a wiki format is that there is a blurred line between authoring and dissemination," he added. "The second something is authored, someone else can edit it [while others can] comment upon those edits."

The agency also is escalating its use of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), a programming method that uses JavaScript within the client to build applications that are more interactive than pages built with HTML and don't need to refresh a Web page every time a user enters or receives new data.

DIA last year began a project to create a data access layer in its architecture using a service-oriented architecture to pull together human intelligence (data gathered by people) and publicly available data gathered from the Internet and other sources into a single environment for analysis, Shepherd added. Analysis of data in this new environment will be done in part by using Web 2.0 applications, such as "mashups," that collect RSS feeds, Google maps and data from the DIA network that users can access with a lightweight AJAX front end, he added.

"Web 2.0 mashup fans on the Internet would be very much at home in the burgeoning environment of top-secret mashups, which use in some cases Google Earth and in some cases other geospatial, temporal or other display characteristics and top-secret data," Shepherd said.

Although he did not provide additional details of how the agency is using mashups, Shepherd did note that the DIA is using JackBe Corp.'s AJAX tools as part of its work to build this new type of application. JackBe has said publicly that DIA is using its Overwatch application built with its NQ Suite of AJAX tools. Overwatch is made up of a personalized, desktop-like dashboard that can display intelligence data stores through a standard browser, JackBe officials have said.

Prabhat Agarwal, manager of information security industry analysis at Input Inc., a research firm that specializes in governmental issues, said that the DIA and other defense agencies are the most advanced users of Web 2.0 tools in the federal government to date because they have a more secure IT infrastructure.

The Age of Customization: Enterprise Web 2.0-The perfect pair of pants

2007-02-22T13:00:00.000-05:00

The Age of Customization: Enterprise Web 2.0-The perfect pair of pants,

hree forces are aligning to make this happen.

Web 2.0 – user empowerment and customization
Ajax – technology techniques to bring richness and back-end interactions to the user
Services – Exposed through SOA or other, services are the enterprise applications building block of tomorrow.

These forces are aligned to support the next generation of..........

Yahoo Patent

2007-02-16T11:14:00.000-05:00

*If you haven't already in the past four months, Yahoo is a great long-term stock buy right now. *

Yahoo is prime to take back command of Web 2.0. Why? Back in 1996 when Yahoo went public for $33 million, it smartly embarked on a process to develop innovative web features. What has gotten less press is the fact that Yahoo holds the keys to its destiny hidden in the deft scripting of a couple key patents, one of which just recently issued and is the focus of our IP-Review…

Yahoo received a patent that has the potential to impact business development, and the futures, of many similarly featured companies including Google, Bloglines, Netvibes, Rojo, Dapper, Pageflakes, NewsGator, LifeIO, as well as over about twenty or so young, budding web 2.0 news aggregator sites, even one that hasn’t really launched.

In 1997, Yahoo was developing a core service: user customizable web pages. What developed defines a lot about who Yahoo is. During this period, it filed an application covering this core concept which resulted in a ‘Dynamic Page Generator’ patent that covered saving a template and delivering real-time information to a user. Another ‘Dynamic Page Generator’ patent just issued sealing the deal. Here is a solid example of Yahoo’s newly minted patent claims:

Some say that the longer the claim, the less valuable the patent. This is a case where we feel Yahoo may have a mighty asset at its disposal. As we’ve noted, many start ups have sprouted in the last two years to leverage RSS and AJAX to provide improvements to Yahoo’s offering.

Tying the claims to the web 2.0 services we’ve mentioned is quite an important step in assessing the potential for infringement. We feel there are two critical elements that need to be met for this patent’s claims to potentially “read on” the myriad of web 2.0 companies’ services. First, the user has a customized template that is saved and stored on a host server. Second, real-time information is stored on the host server and delivered to the user in the template. For most news aggregators, AJAX pretty much defines user customization that is then a saved template. Looking into how real-time information is delivered, Mozilla says: “A desktop RSS aggregator would be at the client end of the RSS syndication. A web-based RSS aggregator would be at the client end of the RSS syndication.” So, the second critical element of real-time information stored locally also appears to be applicable.

Yahoo’s potential to assert its patent rights is a case where it would be hard not to agree that: 1. Yahoo was a pioneer in the user-defined web experience; and 2. Yahoo is still using and [attempting to] benefit from this core feature today. With performance stagnating, investor pressures on the $41 Billion market cap company’s management surely mount.

Yahoo may have been handed a golden ticket, but the real question is, “How will it be used?”

Zimbra Bests Microsoft and Others for Intranet Journal Collaboration Product of the Year Award

2007-02-12T17:10:00.000-05:00

Zimbra Collaboration Suite Honored in Document Management/Collaboration Category SAN MATEO, Calif., Feb. 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Zimbra, the leader in open source, next-generation collaboration and messaging software, today announced that it has won Intranet Journal's Product of the Year Award in the Document Management/Collaboration category. Zimbra Collaboration Suite beat Microsoft SharePoint and Lotus Notes and Domino in a crowded field of market leaders.

"Zimbra was in a tight race with Microsoft SharePoint, but ultimately proved more popular with Intranet Journal voters in the Document Management category," said Tom Dunlap, managing editor of Intranet Journal. "The biggest improvement with Zimbra's latest release is the addition of Documents, which lets you create shared docs directly within Zimbra, documents than can be read and edited by others in your company."

The Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) is an open source collaboration solution that reduces the cost and complexity of collaboration, and changes the way users and administrators interact with their e-mail, calendaring, and document management applications. Last month, ZCS 4.5 was released with an improved Ajax Administrative Interface, expanded support of Zimbra Mobile, and support for growing Ubuntu and Mandriva Linux distributions. Zimbra has seen rapid adoption since its launch in October 2005, with more than six million paid mailboxes globally, serving 1,300 customers through onsite deployments and its hosted partner program.

"We are honored that the readers of Intranet Journal have selected Zimbra as the best solution for document management and collaboration," said Satish Dharmaraj, co-founder and CEO of Zimbra. "Users are tired of communication silos and are demanding integrated e-mail, document management, and other systems. Zimbra is committed to innovation that will deliver such a rich, consistent user experience."

Winners of the IntranetJournal.com 2007 Product of the Year Awards are chosen by the users of Jupitermedia's IntranetJournal.com, a leading online information resource designed specifically for Internet and IT professionals dedicated to building the corporate enterprise.

About Zimbra Collaboration Suite

The Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) provides a unique set of end-user and administrator benefits that make it a flexible solution for deployments of all sizes, from SMBs, to multi-thousand seat enterprises, to service providers with millions of customers. Key features include next-generation email; shared calendaring; Web document authoring and sharing; "over the air" synchronization to a wide range of mobile devices; VoIP integration; and compatibility with Microsoft Outlook, Apple and Linux desktops. The ZCS server is available for popular operating systems: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mac OS X, Debian and SUSE Linux.

About IntranetJournal.com

IntranetJournal.com (http://intranetjournal.com) is a leading community for intranet and content managers providing practical advice on application development, outsourcing, security and all of the issues facing corporate intranet managers.

About Zimbra

Zimbra is the leading provider of open source collaboration and messaging software for enterprises, service providers, educational institutions, and government agencies. The Zimbra Collaboration Suite features an Ajax Administrative user interface and browser based client to dramatically improve the messaging and collaboration experience for administrators and end users alike. Zimbra supports Windows, Apple, and Linux desktops and works with Microsoft Outlook as well as today's most essential PC and mobile devices including the Blackberry, Treo and Motorola Q. Additionally, Zimbra supports popular server operating systems such as Red Hat, Mac, Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora and more. The Zimbra Collaboration Suite was voted Best Enterprise Project in the inaugural 2006 SourceForge.net Community Choice Awards, received a SIIA Codie award for Best Communication or Collaboration Solution and won InfoWorld's 2007 Application Innovator Technology of the Year Award. More information and software downloads are available at http://www.zimbra.com .

NOTE: Zimbra is a trademark of Zimbra, Inc. All other trademarks belong to their respective companies.

Yahoo Pipes - The Internet is a Series of Them

2007-02-12T11:37:00.000-05:00

Yahoo Pipes - The Internet is a Series of Them

Yep, they should have called it Yahoo Tubes, Ted. Nonetheless, Yahoo just went live with Yahoo Pipes, a service that allows you to create your own mashups.

Pipes provides a drag and drop editor that lets you find data sources, mix them up and spit them out - in short, a way to combine feeds in different ways. Examples include an NYTimes-Flickr mashup that matches NYTimes headlines to relevant images, and an aggregated news alert of Yahoo, Google, MSN, Findory, Bloglines and Technorati. The service is social, in the sense that you can have an avatar, view all the mashups from a certain user and even edit these existing mashups to create something new. The editor, in fact, is particularly slick: it’s ajaxy, rather than Flash-powered, and represents actions with modules connected by lines.

Pipes is still a little geeky, admittedly, but it’s a great first step in creating a mashup tool for the masses. Let us know if you create anything cool.

Big software firms take aim at Web 2.0

2007-02-01T22:11:00.000-05:00

January 29th, 2007

Big software firms take aim at Web 2.0

While 2006 was a big year for Web 2.0 in the consumer space, it was barely on the radar in the enterprise world. That didn't stop volumes of press coverage, speculation, and debate about how applicable Web 2.0 technologies — from Ajax to social networking — would actually be to the business world.

However those in the enterprise who wanted to go ahead, experiment, and conduct pilot projects to see how Web 2.0 concepts work for them were largely stuck with very consumer-oriented Web 2.0 applications to try out. That's because until recently, the major software makers that supply the application platforms that run the vast majority of the business world haven't had applications that specifically focused on Web 2.0 patterns and practices, things like social networking, tagging, mashups, architectures of participation, and so on.

The consumerization of the enterprise was predicted to be one of the significant trends of 2007 and a quick look at this list of applications confirms that it will indeed be a key story this year.However, in the last couple of months quite a different picture has emerged and the world's largest software companies have taken clear aim at the Web 2.0 product space with announcement after announcement. IBM, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and Intel all have significant products, often many of them, targeted at offering the modern consumer Web experience to workers inside the firewall. And far from being a me-too play with the rest of the industry, the truth is that as popular as open source is getting — particularly in the Web 2.0 community — many business customers still prefer solutions that play well with the mountains of enterprise IT applications and back-end systems that currently run the business.

And with approaches like Enterprise 2.0 heating up including the cutting edge topics like the emergence of mashup creation tools to build a visual "face" of service-oriented architectures (SOA), it turns out that Web 2.0 applications aimed at the enterprise must deal well with formal services integration, enterprise search, information security, single sign-on, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, and a laundry list of other enterprise issues. These are all topics that the aforementioned firms understand well and are actively addressing in most cases with these new products.

Adding "enterprise context" to Web 2.0 tools require some work but doesn't have to be daunting. Read overviews of how to provide this for blogs and wikis.

It's also true that these are uncertain days for many of the big software firms. This is partially because the world of software is becoming increasingly commoditized while the expectations for how software should be hosted is also moving rapidly from installed native applications to online Software as a Service (SaaS). There's also a sense that enterprise systems have become too complicated, unwieldy, and slow-moving compared to their nimble brethren out on the Web. New Web applications have continued to adapt and evolve out on the Internet quite quickly in comparison to traditional IT, essentially ushering in the Web 2.0 era itself. It was no accident that the Web 2.0 Summit's theme last year was disruption and opportunity, and so it's concomitant on software companies to adjust to the industry and evolve.

The Web 2.0 strategies of these new applications are as interesting and varied as the companies that have come up with them. It's worth taking a look at the big Web 2.0 enterprise apps being announced so far. To get a good feel for the this next generation of enterprise apps, here's a round-up of the latest Web 2.0 software plans of the industry's top software firms. In no particular order:

SAP announced last week that it would be adding Web 2.0-style collaboration capabilities in many of its projects. While SAP's specific Web 2.0 plans are the least defined of all the companies in this, a couple of notable points are the specific implementation of widgets, small bits of mobile code that can be added to a Web page by a user and provide data or functionality from back-end systems. The emergence of end-user widgets on the Web was one of the more interesting parts of the Web 2.0 phenomenon last year as users got more accustomed to being able to control their user experience, using them to create the views and shared spaces through which they collaborate with others. To leverage all of this, SAP says it is also updating its NetWeaver infrastructure to "make SAP data accessible in different formats, including its traditional client software, a Web-based client, portal, mobile devices and widgets." This is a clear bow to both remix and mashups as well as software above the level of a single device.

In recent months IBM has clearly jumped on the Web 2.0 bandwagon with two feet and has been preparing quite a number of products in this space. The announcements a few days ago at Lotusphere 2007 contained lots of interesting material including two significant new Web 2.0 applications designed for business. The first is called Lotus Quickr and is described as "a new Web 2.0-based collaborative content offering designed to transform the way everyday business content, such as documents and rich media, is shared and enable more effective team collaboration." Quickr offers blogs, wikis, syndication, and deep integration into existing content repositories and even into the Windows desktop itself. The other announcement was Lotus Connections, which offers what IBM calls "business-grade social computing." Bringing industrial strength social networking features, Connections offers community features designed to eliminate the need for multiple social software platforms. Taking a sip from the Web 2.0 Kool-Aid, IBM cites Forrester saying, "social software tools will become so much a part of the fabric of an enterprise's collaborative environment that it will be like air — enterprises won't be able to imagine life without it." Finally, IBM is working hard to offering software development products that bring the mashup phenomenon to the enterprise market. I highlighted IBM's QEDWiki end-user mashup IDE in my last post, but a quick tour of AlphaWorks' impressive Collaborative Development Environments section shows that's just the beginning of what IBM has planned.

Not to be outdone, database and enterprise application powerhouse, Oracle, has gotten into the Web 2.0 act with a platform known as WebCenter, which already has an impressive Web site to go along with it. Oracle says WebCenter will "bring Web 2.0-centric applications to your enterprise using open, standards-based architecture". Focusing on the hordes of skilled Java developers that reside in the typical enterprise, and most interestingly Knowledge workers as well, WebCenter provides "a single Web interface to access a wide range of enterprise services, including business applications, enterprise content, business intelligence, enterprise search, communication and collaboration services, and Web 2.0-centric applications. WebCenter Suite improves productivity of developers and end-users alike." Enabling end-users to engage in customer self-service in terms of the IT solution they need is believed by some to be the next major sweet spot in enterprise applications, and like IBM, Oracle is clearly targeting this space.

The company normally known for its formidable microprocessor line and not so much for software has also decided to throw its otherwise quite capable hand in the Enterprise 2.0 ring with a product suite called SuiteTwo. By partnering with leading Web 2.0 applications vendors such as SixApart and SocialText (blogs and wikis respectively), Intel has assembled a relatively complete Enterprise 2.0 solution with leading-edge syndication capabilities (essential for the signals part of the Enterprise 2.0 SLATES mnemonic, for example.) For its part, Intel says that SuiteTwo "is a rich set of interconnected services that combine to improve productivity and enable high-engagement marketing. SuiteTwo includes the most trusted platforms for blogs, wikis, RSS feed reading, and RSS feed management, all under a single management interface." Use of the Enterprise 2.0 phrase will certainly help give it credibility and/or attention in many circles and we'll see how Intel can use its extensive customer and partner relationships to make SuiteTwo a success.

It's just a few hours away from the launch of Windows Vista, which includes Web 2.0-related features such a highly capable end-user RSS/ATOM feed management system. But Microsoft has been providing highly effective Web-based collaborative, social environments for years, best exemplified by products like SharePoint. But Microsoft has traditionally been half-on, half-off the Web 2.0 fence and has adopted the Live brand for its own line of online applications and services. While Live has famously struggled in the consumer space, Microsoft is one of the most capable companies in the enterprise space, providing productivity applications for tens of millions of business customers worldwide. In a fascinating document released last month, Microsoft explains its Web 2.0 strategy in terms of its Microsoft Office 2007 products in a very intriguing, Enterprise 2.0 way. Explaining the planks of Web 2.0 in quite the O'Reilly-esque manner, including "collective intelligence", data-powered applications, and rich user experiences, the document takes readers on a tour of Microsoft's vision for the latest version of Office as a tool to provide Web-based end-user content management, user-driven applications, blogs, wikis, aggregation, user participation, and more. And while Web 2.0 feature staples like tagging, ranking, and commenting are missing from Office 2007 today (and acknowledged to be missing), Microsoft says it's working on this as well as how to make these systems work across the firewall. Microsoft has long maintained sustained interest in resolving the tension and overlap between Web 2.0, SOA, and SaaS and while their latest products show initial progress down this path, I'm expect much more from them in the near future.

Gartner recommended a long term Web 2.0 strategy for most enterprise firms last year. Read an overview exploring if every organization really needs a Web 2.0 strategy.

The consumerization of the enterprise was predicted to be one of the significant trends of 2007 and a quick look at this list of applications confirms that it will indeed be a key story this year. Unfortunately, the history of enterprise applications doesn't bode well for rapid adoption of new tools. Fortunately, the vision for consumerization is one driven much more by pull-based systems such as grassroots adoption similar to the PC two decades ago rather that less efficient push-based deployment by IT departments. In other words, end-users will begin using blogs, wikis, mashup tools, and other social platforms increasingly on their own volition to get their work done. And smart IT department and business uints will figure out how to ride the swell of this tide.

When Does AJAX Make Business Sense?

2007-01-27T17:00:00.000-05:00

Hard-nosed executives recognize that there are costs associated with any benefit. To convince today's upper-level decision makers to approve strategic investments, they need to hear more than phrases like "essential to the business," "the results are too unpredictable," and "yields intangible benefits." In the world of Web development, the move from HTML to AJAX-powered HTML can often be achieved at a relatively low cost, but there are both direct and indirect costs associated with AJAX that must be taken into account. A close analysis of these factors will enable business managers to make more well informed decisions when considering AJAX adoption in a particular application and across their organization.

Let's look first at the expected benefits from AJAX.

AJAX is all about ways to create a more interactive and productive connection between a user and a Web-based application. Because AJAX provides similar advanced user interface features to those in desktop applications (such as advanced UI controls, animated effects and adjustable layout controls) thereby providing the visual and interaction tools needed to make the application self-explanatory users spend less time learning and operating the application. The AJAX partial page update feature minimizes user delays by eliminating the "click, wait, refresh" approach of pre-AJAX HTML applications.

Beyond better user interfaces for existing applications, AJAX enables new classes of applications that fall under the umbrella term Web 2.0 that also fit into a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Among the next-generation applications that will power the enterprise and the Internet of the future are the following:

* Users as co-developers: New AJAX-powered environments, such as application wikis, are empowering users to create their own customized mashups including personalized dashboards and situational composite applications.
* Collaboration: AJAX technologies are typically the centerpiece of Web 2.0 information collection and sharing environments that harness the collective intelligence of disparate communities.
* Software above the level of a single device: Web 2.0 is accelerating the movement from installable desktop applications to Web-based applications, thereby leveraging the advantages of networks and information sharing.
* Cross-device applications and mobility: Simultaneous with the adoption of Web 2.0 is the growing proliferation of Web-capable mobile devices. AJAX technologies enable Web 2.0 applications across both large-screen desktops and small-screen mobile devices.

AJAX often boosts developer productivity. There are many AJAX technology providers, including both commercial products and open source initiatives. As a result, developers will find the off-the-shelf components, toolkits, frameworks, educational materials, and other resources they need to produce and maintain next-generation Web 2.0 applications built with AJAX. And due to open source alternatives, AJAX provides zero-cost deployment options as well.

Because of competitive pressures, vendors often vie for your AJAX business based on the developer productivity benefits they offer. Two common productivity features are UI markup languages (UIMLs) and IDE integration. The UIMLs allow for the use of declarative approaches using HTML and/or XML for large parts of an AJAX application. IDEs can provide source code completion, source code highlighting, drag-and-drop authoring, JavaScript debugging, XHR monitors, runtime stack views, and variable watching.

AJAX and SOA need each other so both can reach their full potential. SOA's encapsulation of business functionality into discrete services with well-defined Web Service interfaces makes it easier for AJAX toolkits to facilitate the creation of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). AJAX applications need to leverage business functionality, but, in the absence of SOA, AJAX toolkits must have myriad adapters supporting disparate technical means of accessing that functionality. The more that SOA advances, the more the toolkits will be able to streamline access to business functions by supporting Web Service client technology. Thus, SOA helps move AJAX forward.

Conversely, AJAX helps SOA move forward. We need RIA technologies to be able to exploit and justify the significant investment that SOA entails. The ability to create mashups, dashboards, and composite applications relatively rapidly to respond flexibly to changing business conditions is the essence of the ROI that we expect from investing in SOA.

In addition, AJAX deployment offers several long-term strategic benefits including:

* Replacement for desktop applications: AJAX offers a desktop-like user experience while retaining the benefits of server-based application deployment, centralized infrastructure administration, easier scalability, and immediate availability of application updates to all users. As a result, AJAX helps accelerate the movement away from installable, two-tier, client/server applications to multi-tier Web applications.
* Higher customer expectations around the user interface: The industry is embracing richer, more desktop-like, user interfaces for customer-facing Web applications. In many circumstances, adopting AJAX techniques is becoming a business requirement to maintain parity with the rest of the industry and match growing user expectations about Web-based user experiences.
* Operations efficiencies: In today's global economy, cost efficiency is more important than ever. AJAX techniques can help maintain the efficiency and competitiveness of internal systems.

What Are the Costs Associated with AJAX?
The costs for adopting AJAX depend on the circumstances of the application you're developing. In cases where AJAX snippets are added to existing HTML applications in an ad hoc manner, the incremental costs can be small. On the other hand, if the AJAX deployment strategy requires significant retooling of the existing IT infrastructure and substantial staff re-training then costs obviously go up.

It's also important to keep in mind that AJAX techniques require developers to learn techniques on both the client side as well as the server side.

On the client side, developers may have to familiarize themselves with one or more AJAX client-side toolkits, along with programming techniques for incremental DOM updates, XHLHttpRequest-based client/server communications, and asynchronous communications event handling. Most of these techniques require incremental knowledge on top of existing expertise with HTML and JavaScript.

On the server side, re-education requirements depend on the AJAX toolkits in use. For some toolkits, developers may have to familiarize themselves with the AJAX toolkit's UI markup language and its server-side AJAX APIs.

Most AJAX applications leverage an AJAX framework but still require some level of customization by the development team. A key factor in calculating the cost of adopting AJAX is the amount of customization work required to complete the task. If the AJAX framework's built-in features are sufficient for your needs then your AJAX development costs will be lower.

For existing applications that are modified to take advantage of AJAX techniques, end users will require some re-training on the applications' new AJAX-powered user interfaces.
New Issues to Manage
Like anything else, the AJAX technique of partial data exchange can be misapplied so that server and network loads increase in an undesirable manner. So it's critical that AJAX developers are made aware of the importance of these issues and that bandwidth behavior is tested before applications are deployed.

Another concern is the misapplication of AJAX "push techniques," where AJAX toolkits enable servers to push incremental data to clients without requiring the clients to poll periodically. Developer education about these issues and pre-deployment testing of the application's network behavior are important.

With mashups plugging in third-party components there are potential security implications. It's recommended that IT managers establish a company policy on mashup products and technologies, such as only installing markup frameworks from trusted suppliers; only allowing components from trusted sources; and requiring secure gateway facilities that control the domains with which particular components can communicate.

Typically each AJAX toolkit has its own features, markup, and APIs. Long-term maintenance costs will be minimized if the application uses a popular Ajax toolkit that's familiar to a large pool of developers and by ensuring that the Ajax toolkit is OpenAjax-conformant. (See "Managing Long-Term Costs with Help from OpenAJAX.")

Other Factors To Consider
Now let's take a look at some additional key considerations in the cost/benefit analyses of adopting AJAX and determining ROI. Some important points to keep in mind include:

* Interaction and user experience requirements: If a given application requires either high levels of user responsiveness (that is, it's undesirable to use the old-style "click, wait, refresh" HTML technique) or requires a self-evident desktop-like user interface (to limit training costs) then AJAX techniques can reduce user wait time and improve productivity in a measurable way.
* Network bandwidth requirements: Applications that generate high levels of network activity often benefit from AJAX techniques by leveraging the partial data exchange and partial page update features associated with AJAX. AJAX techniques often replace full-page requests with small data exchanges, reducing network bandwidth requirements, minimizing server CPU processing, and improving response times.
* Scalability requirements: Large and/or growing user populations require scalable application deployment architectures. In such scenarios, it's critical to determine whether the AJAX-enabled application offers appropriate scalability characteristics.
* The mission-critical nature of the application: The greater the strategic value of the application, the greater the investment in RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability) required. Highly mission-critical applications may be less desirable early candidates, but offer the highest ultimate return.
* The complexity of database interaction: AJAX will be more difficult to apply where there's no good separation of back-end databases from the Web-tier application logic. Relevant questions to consider: Is the application tightly coupled to a back-end database? To what degree is transaction integrity and recoverability critical, and how do these factors relate to AJAX partial update techniques?
* The real-time nature of the underlying application: In general real-time monitoring and real-time business applications benefit significantly from AJAX, particularly the push technologies available in some AJAX toolkits.
* Systems integrator requirements: If the application requires involving a systems integrator then it's important to determine how familiar the integrator is with AJAX and the AJAX toolkits that you plan to use on the project.

Managing Long-Term Costs with Help from OpenAjax
The OpenAjax Alliance produces various specifications that define OpenAjax conformance, an industry trust mark that promotes interoperability. As OpenAjax conformance specifications emerge, customers who require compliance from their AJAX vendors will increase their interoperability, safety, and choice, and thereby help manage the long-term costs of adopting AJAX.

Conclusion
The move to AJAX is part of a business operations strategy and is often coupled with the move to SOA. Arriving at estimates of return on AJAX or SOA is a difficult challenge for IT managers and executives. IT can support and even lead the effort by providing recommendations on appropriate questions to ask the business side of the house. IT can also help generate the answers needed to estimate ROI. Establishing an IT-user team to help the business drive the direction of the AJAX effort can be a forum for confirming and refining ROI estimates. Making the leap to AJAX isn't something that can be done overnight or with the snap of your fingers. It involves serious consideration and an honest internal evaluation. But by taking all of these points into account, decision makers will be better equipped to pave the way toward AJAX adoption.

Ajax emerging as RIA alternative of choice,

2007-01-12T23:58:00.000-05:00

Ajax emerging as RIA alternative of choice, says Burton
By Rich Seeley, News Writer
10 Jan 2007 | SearchWebServices.com

Ajax is positioned to become "a mainstream tool used by Web developers as an alternative to other rich Internet application (RIA) technologies," writes Richard Monson-Haefel, senior analyst with the Burton Group Inc. in a report released today.

In my opinion, these JSF-based approaches will remain niche players.
Jason Bloomberg
Senior Analyst, ZapThink LLC.

Organizations considering RIA options are advised in the report to begin working with Ajax as opposed to the competing technologies including Adobe Flash, Java applets, Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere (WPF/E), Mozilla's XML User Interface Language (XUL) and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). However, Monson-Haefel does predict that Flash will be the choice for applications that require sophisticated animation as he finds it unlikely that Ajax will evolve to provide those capabilities.

"The principal advantage of using Ajax over other RIA technologies is its seamless integration with Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)," the Burton analyst writes. "Rather than being isolated to a box or a page component, Ajax functionality mixes well with HTML, allowing rich graphical user interface (GUI) capabilities to be incrementally added to existing Web sites without having to re-implement content."

Another advantage of Ajax, according to Monson-Haefel is that it can be used with "just about any application platform that supports the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)." Ajax is compatible with PHP, Perl, Active Server Pages for .NET (ASP.NET) and Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), he notes.

The Burton report, "Ajax: A Rich Internet Application Technology", recommends that organizations take an incremental approach to implementing Ajax recognizing that while most of the technologies involved have been around since the 1990s, commercial tools for Ajax development are not yet mature.

While the report aims at organizations looking to dip their toes into Ajax, it notes that sophisticated Web developers are already making use of the technology. As sophistication grows, Monson-Haefel predicts more integration with the Adobe Flash products for streaming content and animation.

He notes that Ajax "is not as mature as Adobe Flash and has historically been viewed as a complex approach to RIA development." The reliance of Ajax on JavaScript, which not all Java developers are familiar with, has meant that advanced Web developers have been the primary audience for Ajax. However, he notes that is changing with "Ajax-enabling frameworks such as Java Server Faces (JSF), as well as Ruby on Rails, Struts, ASP.NET and PHP, which make it easier to do Ajax without being a JavaScript programmer.

On the JSF front, vendors are making progress, says Ted Farrell, chief architect and vice president of tools and middleware, at Oracle Corp. He notes that his company, along with Sun Microsystems Inc. and IBM, all now have implementations of JSF that developers can use with little or no JavaScript coding in their Ajax applications.

"As tool vendors, our design time has gotten better for JavaServer Faces," Farrell said. "I think we got smarter over the last two years in making components, shaping them to be simpler for the user rather than having them be complicated. So there's a combination of the components getting better and the tools getting better having lowered the barrier for people to start using and being successful with JavaServer Faces. applications."
For more information
Check out our Ajax Learning Guide

Ajax after the hype

Farrell also sees Ajax emerging as the RAI technology of choice and JSF as the way most developers can work with the technology.

"Developers don't have to learn anything new," he said. "They're still programming in JSP and JavaServer Faces like they always did. They get the advantage of being able to build rich Ajax-based applications."

However, Jason Bloomberg, senior analyst with ZapThink LLC., remains skeptical of the JSF tools.

"We've seen one other vendors tout the benefits of JavaServer Faces -- ICEsoft out of Calgary," Bloomberg says. "They also offer a JSF approach for creating Ajax apps without the need for scripting in JavaScript. An additional benefit is that it deals with cross-browser issues, but the downside is that it's a Java tool only for Java developers. In my opinion, these JSF-based approaches will remain niche players, while the language-neutral guys like Nexaweb and JackBe, as well as incumbents like Adobe and Microsoft, will become established as the leading players."

It’s Curtains For Portals

2007-01-09T16:24:00.000-05:00

Tuesday, 09 January 2007

By Robin Bloor, Partner

Portals first emerged when the browser captured the hearts, minds and imagination of the software industry. With the advent of the browser, the windowed desktop was suddenly passé and the assumption was that the browser itself could become a kind of desktop. It wasn’t websites like Yahoo!, Excite, Lycos and AOL were also dubbed portals because they provided a similar kind of entry point to surfing the web.

Early portals evolved into the idea of an “Enterprise Portal” - portal software that provided a coherent access to all relevant enterprise applications, as well as to information available in the enterprise and to relevant external information services. Business users could arrange ‘portlets’ by choosing elements from a common set of interfaces to back office systems. Access to intranets, extranets and useful Internet resources could also be available. The business user could simply “pick and mix’, with a little help from IT.

It Was Never Going To Work

This idea was never going to work because there were too many business applications that portals could not accommodate (Windows and client/server apps, AS/400 apps, old mainframe apps, etc.) It was never going to be possible to convert all of those applications to have browser front-ends before the browser front-end itself changed. Here we are in 2007 and it has changed. Everybody’s talking about Web 2.0; Web 2.0 is certainly not your elder brother’s browser interface.

The portals that have been built and implemented are usually half-solutions at best. The rug is being pulled from under them because Web 2.0 is promising a shiny new GUI and portals are already beginning to look like something the dog won’t eat.

It Was All Wrong Anyway

In my opinion, portals were a wrong idea from the start. The crux of the matter is this: When you want to use some sort of access device, be it a desktop or a laptop or a PDA, you want either to navigate to stuff or do stuff. In a sane and secure world, you need to authenticate who you are before you can do anything. Authentication requires some kind of ID management software. If there were such a thing as a “portal” it should have a deeply intimate relationship with an ID management system that would ultimately allow the user to invoke permitted applications. So far so good - we might just be able to imagine a portal that does that - I believe that Sun has such a product.

But the next requirement simply blows everything away. The “portal” needs to be able to present a workable interface on whatever access device is being used (or possibly, refuse to execute because it isn’t possible) for whatever service has been requested.

For this, you need much than just a browser. You actually need a whole Service Oriented Architecture. What we are gradually uncovering here is a whole set of presentation services that needs to include identity and security services, messaging services (both for work flows and communications), interface presentation and translation (possibly dynamic) and probably, registry-based navigation.

And that is why it’s all over for portals; portals are miles away from being able to fit into SOA. Even if Web 2.0 wasn’t making them look terribly long in the tooth, they’d become an embarrassment when you tried to integrate them into a Service Oriented environment. It’s time to close the door on portals, and tiptoe quietly away.

The SOA Forecast for 2007

2007-01-07T11:21:00.000-05:00

Document ID: ZAPFLASH-200713 | Document Type: ZapFlash
By Ronald Schmelzer
Posted: Jan. 03, 2007

For those in the United States, 2007 has started out with a bang – two major snow storms in the Rocky Mountains and a persistent warm front that’s keeping the entire East Coast in unusually warm weather for this time of year. Even more so, it’s football season in the US and both the New England Patriots and Baltimore Ravens are in the playoffs – the two teams representing ZapThink’s two office locations. Of course, speaking metaphorically, with regards to SOA, 2006 ended with a bang and 2007 is already showing considerable warmth and competitive vigor. ZapThink has seen SOA take off even more aggressively than we anticipated at the beginning of 2006, and all indications show that SOA strength will be further reinforced and expanded in 2007 to many corners of the IT environment, throughout the world and in many different industries. And so, during this season of sultry winter weather and competition, it is time to evaluate our predictions from the previous year and forecast th e architectural and competitive climate for SOA in 2007.
2006 SOA Predictions: Four for Four!
In last year’s 2005 SOA Scorecard and 2006 Predictions ZapFlash, we predicted that companies would move beyond their tentative SOA projects to more substantial projects leveraging emerging best practices for all aspects of the Service lifecycle. More specifically, we bemoaned the fact that companies were thinking too much about having a bunch of Services (so-called “ABOS”) and not enough about an architecture oriented towards the ongoing evolution of those Services. We surmised that companies would soon wake up to the fact that SOA demanded true enterprise architecture activities, artifacts, and skills, and less-so just rote software development and technology implementation. Indeed, we believed that one side-effect of the maturation of SOA projects was that companies would finally give proper emphasis to the use of a registry/repository throughout the Service lifecycle, effective Service lifecycle manage ment, and a comprehensive IT governance framework. We predicted that an emerging set of next generation SOA projects would put some enterprises in technology leadership positions, and indeed, it seems that all of those predictions came to pass in the year preceding.

Continuing on the thread discussed earlier with regards to maturing SOA implementations, we also predicted the SOA governance space was ready for a major shake-out and consolidation. Boy, were we right on target! 2006 bore witness to the frenzied acquisition of all things governance and registry related as well as the emergence of Service lifecycle vendors as the next must-have technology in any SOA infrastructure portfolio.

Our next prediction was that emphasis would shift from being solely Service provider centric to an increase in awareness, and implementation, of Service consumer-centric tooling and methodologies. For sure, 2006 emerged as the year that Ajax moved from being an acronym to being a metaphor to all things Service consumption-centric that enhanced the browser experience as a first-class environment for user interaction. But even more so, 2006 saw the emergence of real Service consumption and composition tools that aimed to facilitate the creation of Service-oriented Business Applications (SOBAs) and Enterprise Mashups that free the consumer-focused developer from having to worry about the location and implementation details of the Services they consume. Indeed, have we already reached the Web Services Tipping Point?

Another prediction we made last year was that regulatory compliance would take center stage in 2006. Specifically, we said that there would be a dramatic increase in the number and capability of SOA-based compliance solutions coming to market in 2006. Some of these solutions may be in the form of composite applications, while others may simply be sets of Services. Either way, SOA will become increasingly critical to many enterprise's compliance initiatives. The result was more compliance-focused SOA initiatives than we have fingers on our hands to count! Multi-national firms in particular found that compliance with global regulations that continue to change at relatively unpredictable rates has, as a result, an unpredictable burden on their IT departments and thus they must find a way to grapple with such external change factors. ZapThink released a survey of SOA consulting firms in mid 2006 with the main finding th at SOA itself is a hard sell for most companies, but a focus on selling solutions to common business problems, of which solving compliance problems is a key one, is a cake-walk.

2007 Prediction #1: SOA Quality and Testing Market the Next Must-Have Space
So, it seems that we were right on target with our 2006 predictions. Maybe they just were too obvious when we made them at the end of 2005. So in this iteration, we’ll try to make some predictions that are less so, or at the very least might be up for debate. One prediction is that the new, hot area in the SOA marketplace are testing and quality tools and solutions for SOA. While SOA-focused testing and quality vendors have been around for at least five years (we first covered them in our Web Services Testing report in 2002), the impetus for widespread adoption of testing across the full Service lifecycle hasn’t been there for much of that time.

However, that is set to change in a big way in 2007. Now that companies are through with their proof-of-concept and play phases of Web Services-centric adoption (less SOA and more ABOS), they have to grapple with the real issues of evolving SOA: change and version management, testing in a production environment (runtime testing), quality assurance of all SOA artifacts including contracts, policies, schema, models, declarative composition and process metadata, and other forms of metadata, as well as deal with change-time and run-time governance that demands more than simply testing the code that exposes a Web Services interface. As a result of this heightened awareness of the real challenges in maintaining a SOA implementation, demand for SOA quality and testing solutions will skyrocket in 2007, leading to greater acquisitions, increased consolidation, new venture creation, and boatloads of case studies on the topic. Watch this space for the real action.

2007 Prediction #2: Enterprise Architect Drought
One dire prediction for 2007 is that there simply won’t be enough qualified and SOA experienced enterprise architects (EA) around. Sure, there might be many “paper architects” – that is, those that claim EA and/or SOA skills on their resumes or in their career history, but much of that experience will be attendance at a few vendor-heavy SOA courses, the development of Web Services-centric interfaces, and a sore lack of any methodology, modeling, Service lifecycle, or governance experience to speak of. Yes, it might just be that the biggest force gating widespread adoption of SOA is not the technical complexity of SOA projects (one can actually say that the technology part is relatively trivial), but rather the organizational, architectural, and skill gap that most companies have in making this architectural change a reality.

ZapThink has seen first-hand evidence of this lack of EA skills. First, there is a significant demand in the marketplace for experienced SOA talent. Second, we are seeing a burgeoning of SOA consulting companies that offer kick-start approaches to SOA in which they supply the experienced architects and their customers supply the heavy-lift labor to implement the Services. Already we’re starting to see a bifurcation in the IT community between architect and developer, with development seen as an increasing commodity whereas architecture is an increasing scarcity.

ZapThink is doing something about this lack of EA talent. In fact, we’re doing two big things about it this year. First, ZapThink launched its Licensed ZapThink Architect (LZA) program in late 2006 with little fanfare, but we are planning to trumpet its increasing value and successes with greater volume throughout 2007 and beyond. While certifications do exist for aspects of SOA, they are usually specific to a particular technology du-jour or an individual vendor implementation. Increasingly, individuals are looking to go beyond understanding of what SOA is and dive much deeper into how to do it right. The demand is thus more than just training, but also the backing of a qualified third-party organization to endorse their existing SOA skills, enable continuous improvement, enhance networking in the community, and enhance their current SOA-enabled careers. ZapThink is filling the unmet need for knowledge and credentials in th is area with its new LZA program. You’ll see increasing references to the LZA program throughout 2007, and you can dive deeper into details at http://www.zapthink.com/lza.html.

In addition to the LZA program, ZapThink will release within the next week or two its Architect Resource Center (ARC), a partnership with recruiting firm Excel Partner to list qualified EA and SOA resources on the ZapThink site to meet the needs for SOA resources. Indeed, ZapThink is now in the position to directly help end-user firms hungry for SOA talent, through our new ARC offering, and if our prediction comes to pass, we’ll probably find more demand for such resources than even we have the capacity to supply.

2007 Prediction #3: The SOA Suite Busts a Few Buttons… Open Source the Remedy?
The final prediction ZapThink will stick its proverbial neck out to make for 2007 is that the SOA suites might get a bit too big in 2007. Warren Buffet is fond of saying, “don’t ask a barber if you need a haircut”. What he means to say is that vendors of a service or a product have a self-interest in promoting the need for products that probably won’t keep you away from their sales department for long. While there’s no doubt that SOA vendors are solving real problems with products that, in many cases, actually work, the problem is that these SOA solutions have grown from individual, point-products that solve discrete SOA problems to gigantic SOA suites that seem to be every bit the monolithic platform that they had been intended to replace. In fact, we have been quoted as saying that monolithic SOA platforms, in which you have to buy all the various parts of the solution in order to get the true value as promised by the vendor, is at its core an un-SOA philosophy.

The idea of SOA is to promote loose coupling and composition in an environment of continuous change and heterogeneity. A proper architecture should be blind to the underlying runtime infrastructure, messaging protocol, or application server environment. Want to implement SOA on a Commodore 64 and COBOL-based mainframe environment using CORBA over a token-ring network? Knock your socks off – there’s nothing un-SOA about that. But saying that you need to use a single messaging bus, Service container environment, or management infrastructure to get any value out of SOA is being disingenuous to the SOA mindset, and a disservice to end-users looking to finally take control of their own IT environment.

One potential antidote to the vendor indigestion that many end-user firms are experiencing is the burgeoning of open source efforts that take a laissez-faire approach to technology implementations. ZapThink is starting to see increasing use of Apache and a multitude of other open source technology underpinnings for a variety of the runtime and design-time aspects of SOA, including Service exposure, messaging, composition, rich client, and even security and reliability offerings. The Eclipse Foundation has really hit a stride with regards to dominating the development landscape for many SOA efforts. While it would be hard for us to say that such open source efforts would crimp the businesses of the well-established software vendors, it is clear that those efforts are not outlying or rogue efforts proposed by small departments of large firms or by small companies. Rather, it is precisely the behavior of many large software companies that is encouraging or forcing the han d of large companies to seriously consider open source Pepto-Bismol for their vendor-induced heartburn.

The ZapThink Take
In addition to the above predictions, one significant observation in 2006 is the state of global adoption of SOA. Is the United States behind the rest of the world with regards to SOA adoption and maturity? Probably not, but it certainly isn’t ahead. Indeed, most of the largest, advanced, and oft-quoted examples of SOA projects in both the press and by software vendors in 2006 were in Europe, Canada, Asia, or Australia. There’s so much to analyze and understand in the trends towards global SOA adoption that we’ll leave this topic for a future ZapFlash, but rest assured this IT movement is unlike most others with respect to adoption.

There are probably a few more predictions we could make for the year, but we’ll be brief for the sake of your reading time and also so that we have more material for future ZapFlashes. Regardless of where you think SOA is heading, it’s clear we’ve crossed some sort of chasm with regards to SOA adoption. More companies than ever are already supposing that they’re going to Service-orient their systems and businesses , and this is resulting the growth and value of SOA throughout the world. ZapThink wishes you all a wonderful, healthy, and rewarding 2007!

SaaS in 2007: It’s about services, doh!

2007-01-02T15:24:00.000-05:00

Good post by Phil Wainewright

In my trio of predictions for SaaS in 2007, I've saved the biggest trend till last. The coming year will see a growing acknowledgement that SaaS is just part of a wider move towards Internet-based automated services. This is such an all-embracing trend that it will drive several other sub-trends, each of which can be turned into a prediction of their own. All of these emerging phenomena will be signs of the wider underlying trend taking hold.

More acquisitions of SaaS vendors by business service providers. I already highlighted several examples during 2006. The most telling was ADP's acquisition of Employease in August. As I said at the time, this wasn't a case of ADP moving into the SaaS sector:

"… it's merely extending into new areas of automated business services — and that's what the on-demand revolution is really about — using software to do a better job of operating automated business services."

Proof that this wasn't just a one-off came in testimony from Progress Software's SaaS partner ecosystem, which as a result of acquisitions now includes US Bank and legal and business information provider LexisNexis. Then in November, American Express Business Travel made a $22.5 million investment in Rearden Commerce alongside the launch of Axiom, an AmEx-branded 'intelligent online marketplace' based on Rearden's hosted employee services platform. My verdict on the deal:

"American Express is the grand-daddy of business service providers and so the alliance with Rearden both reinforces and further validates the trend."

The acquisition trend will accelerate in 2007 as business service providers recognize the potential of SaaS solutions to enhance and modernize their service offerings, extend their market reach and enrichen their profitability.

An expanding universe of partnerships between SaaS vendors and other online service providers. The flipside of business service providers acquiring SaaS capabilities is that SaaS vendors will increasingly package online services into their offerings. Discussing this trend in November, I mentioned examples from Landslide and Winweb, two vendors serving the small business market that bundle optional virtual assistant services with their on-demand applications. I noted that:

"…these solutions focus on live business results that really matter to their customers. They're not selling software, they're focusing on what customers actually want to achieve."

Another example is Klir Technologies, which aggregates information from vendor support databases and industry publications into its on-demand systems management application. This means that when users get an alert of a problem, the application can automatically retrieve relevant background information, cutting the time it takes to identify and implement a fix.

During the course of the year, this 'mashing up' of on-demand software and other virtual services will make the term SaaS increasingly redundant. Software in itself 'as a service' is not where we're headed. It's just services, with software as just one of several supporting enablers, and the Internet as another.

Convergence of Web 2.0 with SaaS and SOA. Look at any well-known Web 2.0 provider — Flickr, 37Signals, YouTube, Skype, Feedburner — and one thing they all have in common is that they're hosted services, resident on the Web. Of course, no one calls them SaaS, in part because this mode of delivery is taken for granted in the Web 2.0 arena, and in part because, although they rely on some pretty powerful and innovative software, what they deliver is a complete usable service, not just a raw software tool. In this context, SaaS is just the software industry's way of catching up with what Web 2.0 represents: a move towards using Web-resident software to deliver the services that people want to use.

A separate but related development in the enterprise software world is a move to what's called service-oriented architecture (SOA), which is a way of designing software infrastructure as a set of autonomous on-demand services. As Microsoft's Gianpaolo Carraro and Fred Chong have written, this enables a composition layer where services can be assembled into applications as required. Those services will typically come from inside the enterprise, but it's just as easy to include services from external providers and fold them into the mix.

Whether they're internal services or external services, Web 2.0 mashups or enterprise 1.0 legacy applications, the overriding trend I'm highlighting here is that It's all about services:

"… Some of the services are like components. Others are like applications. A further bunch are like Web 2.0 information feeds and mashups. Another set are more like semi-automated business services that deliver real-world business results, such as shipping an order or transacting a payment. The common unifying factor here is a services idiom, in which providers autonomously deliver results according to contracts. That describes SOA and SaaS and Web 2.0."

Aggregation as the new competitive battleground. One of the least appreciated strengths of the on-demand model is its ability to leverage shared services. When hosted systems managemnt vendor Klir Technologies launched in September, one of the things that fascinated me was its use of the shared services model to slash the cost of keeping up to date with manufacturers' device interfaces:

"For every application or class of device that Klir supports, it writes code to query the standard interface developed by the manufacturer, and then it hosts that code in its data center. Because of its shared services architecture, that code is instantly available to all its customers. That’s it. No messing about with agents. No deployment delays. It’s compelling because you can imagine how many applications and devices there are in the world, and how often a systems management vendor has to develop, distribute and deploy new agents because some application vendor or device maker has decided to upgrade their new systems management interface. Klir’s shared services, standard-interface, no-agent model allows it to implement support across its entire customer and prospect base for any new interface, within just a few days of that new interface appearing."

As I noted above, Klir also leverages links to third-party information sources, with similar economies of scale.

This ability to aggregate shared services is absolutely core to the on-demand model, and it was interesting that the ability to integrate different services came up as one of the most important future themes when SaaS CEOs discussed What's next for SaaS at the recent SIIA OnDemand Summit:

"There's clearly a shared belief that integration will happen through some kind of hub — though no clear view as to whether that hub will be a platform, a marketplace or a customer-facing aggregator. The inherent risk here that vendors have to be wary of is the potential to become dependent on — and perhaps at the mercy of — an intermediary who takes control of the customer relationship. Several vendors were evidently alive to the flipside opportunity this represents of themselves becoming the hub that others depend on."

One of the most critical challenges for vendors in 2007 and beyond will be winning the race to aggregate shared services in the way that best meets their customers' needs while securing the vendors' own competitive position. There are many aspects to get right, including technology, choice, positioning and pricing. It will probably take more than a single year before a definitive outcome begins to become clear and we can judge who the winners finally are. One of the most interesting contention points will be getting the balance right between predetermined aggregation by the vendor or by its ecosystem partners and on-demand aggregation by the end user (especially in the context of client-centric aggregation platforms, which I touched on in my previous SaaS in 2007 posting).

Emergence of the on-demand business. Concluding my recent definition of SaaS, I wrote:

Essentially, this is just a new spin on business services, which is something we've had since before the advent of the Internet, or even of computing itself. It's business services, automated by software and connected up by the Internet.

The corollary of having a new way of delivering business services is that businesses can organize themselves and operate in innovative new ways. Fellow-ZDNet blogger Joe McKendrick has called this the loosely coupled business. It's now possible to set up in business using on-demand services and Internet-based communications without having any of the bother of acquiring premises, staff, manufacturing plant or distribution facilities.

This goes way beyond business process outsourcing, in the same way that SaaS has gone way beyond application outsourcing. Thinking in terms of outsourcing internal capabilities retains the old mindset of a monolithic corporation. It's not BPO, it's about contracting for services, and being able to do so for services that previously could only realistically be performed internally.

This change in how businesses are built and operated parallels the change that's taken place in manufacturing over the past two decades. A hundred years ago, the norm was for a manufacturer to custom-build every component that went into any of its products. Ford even smelted its own steel and generated its own electricity. Today, look at your mobile phone, assembled from parts manufactured by a myriad of different suppliers, relying on intellectual property contributed by dozens of different patent holders, each of whom earned a royalty when the phone was made. Today's world is built on connections, and the on-demand business is one that successfully exploits those connections to deliver the service its customers demand economically, efficiently and profitably.

2006-12-31T12:34:00.000-05:00

Your results:
You are Iron Man

Iron Man		75%
The Flash		65%
Green Lantern		65%
Batman		65%
Catwoman		65%
Hulk		65%
Supergirl		57%
Spider-Man		50%
Superman		50%
Wonder Woman		42%
Robin		32%

Inventor. Businessman. Genius.

Click here to take the Superhero Personality Quiz

New Facebok Group

2006-12-30T12:12:00.000-05:00

There is a new Facebook group 'Rich Enterprise Applications'.
Advancing the discusion of the next wave of Rich Enterprise Web 2.0 Applications that leverage Ajax, SOA, Web Services, and SaaS to create desktop like functionality through a browser.

Saddam Hussein hanged

2006-12-30T11:50:00.000-05:00

Saddam Hussein, the former Iraqi dictator who spent his last years in captivity after his ruthless regime was toppled by the U.S.-led coalition in 2003, was hanged before dawn Saturday for crimes committed in a brutal crackdown during his reign.

My new year's wish is for both counties and the world to now move forward productively to end the violence and establish a new self-serving government infrustructure in Iraq.

The Next Frontier: Web 2.0

2006-12-30T11:48:00.000-05:00

Ajax Muscles Up
by Steve Smith, December 2006 issue
For many marketers, the overused "Web 2.0" moniker is synonymous with the network
effect, be it the social search of Yahoo's Del.icio.us, the ersatz village of MySpace, or the content-sharing of YouTube. But the stealth trend to watch in the Web 2.0 model involves a radical rethinking of Web interfaces that moves the solitary desktop computing experience online and into a collaborative space.

Online communities and offerings like Google's Gmail, Yahoo's Flickr, and Zoho.com, a suite of business productivity tools, represent only the beginning of a trend that offers individuals and businesses the applications they need to craft and build their own communities.

Dubbed "Ajax" programming by Jesse James Garrett, the president of Adaptive Path, a user experience consultancy, this collection of technologies is rapidly transforming the way we interact with the Web. "In a lot of ways it is the point at which the Web reaches maturity and starts to fulfill a lot of the dreams that people had about it in the mid-'90s," says Garrett. E-mail, calendaring, word processing, even spreadsheets could easily migrate online in the next few years.

"We're entering an unprecedented period of user interface innovation, as Web developers are finally able to build Web applications as rich as local PC-based applications," says Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media in his seminal essay on the Web.2.0 concept. The open-source software and applications movement has also helped spur these developments.

What does all of this mean to marketers? No one knows for sure yet, but it's no accident that the Web's 800-pound Google-rilla is already at the center of Ajax. Web-based collaborative word processor, Writely.com, represents the current apex of Ajax programming, and it's owned by Google. The new Google Desktop Gadgets deploy these technologies to put everything from games to calendars, clocks, and even Google search boxes and results on Web sites, further proliferating Big G's reach.

Microsoft has countered with its evolving line of "Live" Web-based services. The most immediate fallout from exploding Ajax use could be a breakdown in traditional metrics. Ajax applications engage users for longer periods of time and offer them rich data, but they don't spur Web-page reloading. The page-view metric doesn't work here; this is one trend that begs for different ways to gauge user involvement. But the real promise of Ajax may be in letting designers and advertisers plant highly functional and fully interactive applications on anyone's Web site. Earlier this year, the site builder network Freewebs.com partnered with Sony Pictures to create a "Zathura" widget offering games related to the film. The widget got picked up by 11,000 Freewebs sites and used 600,000 times, according to the company, which is now trying to turn widgets into brand advertising.

Ultimately, Ajax could help marketers weave their way into the ethos of Web 2.0 by offering consumers more functions and features, not more marketing. "A lot of Web 2.0 is about taking the Web back from marketers," says Matt MacQueen, director of experience planning of Arc Worldwide, an integrated marketing company.

The challenge for marketing in the Web 2.0 world, then, is not to find new and clever ways for your brand to be a buddy on MySpace. "You have to offer value or solve a problem I as a consumer have," MacQueen says. If consumers are controlling the messages they receive and even the designs of their Web interactions by using tools like RSS and Ajax widgets to shape their browsing experiences, then marketers need to start giving them the tools to do so.

Contributing writer Steve Smith is a longtime new-media consultant and columnist, and current editor of Wireless Business Forecast for Access Intelligence at TelecomWeb.com. Contact him at popeyesmith@comcast.net.

Time Person of the Yr: Web 2.0.....Sort of

2006-12-18T12:37:00.000-05:00

Follows the Me, me , me construct of enterprise mashups and situational applications. Users create the web apps they need, when they want it.

From the December 25, 2006 issue of TIME magazine

-- The "Great Man" theory of history is usually attributed to the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, who wrote that "the history of the world is but the biography of great men." He believed that it is the few, the powerful and the famous who shape our collective destiny as a species. That theory took a serious beating this year.

To be sure, there are individuals we could blame for the many painful and disturbing things that happened in 2006. The conflict in Iraq only got bloodier and more entrenched. A vicious skirmish erupted between Israel and Lebanon. A war dragged on in Sudan. A tin-pot dictator in North Korea got the Bomb, and the President of Iran wants to go nuclear too. Meanwhile nobody fixed global warming, and Sony didn't make enough PlayStation3s.

But look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men. It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes.

The tool that makes this possible is the World Wide Web. Not the Web that Tim Berners-Lee hacked together (15 years ago, according to Wikipedia) as a way for scientists to share research. It's not even the overhyped dotcom Web of the late 1990s. The new Web is a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution.

And we are so ready for it. We're ready to balance our diet of predigested news with raw feeds from Baghdad and Boston and Beijing. You can learn more about how Americans live just by looking at the backgrounds of YouTube videos those rumpled bedrooms and toy-strewn basement rec rooms than you could from 1,000 hours of network television.

And we didn't just watch, we also worked. Like crazy. We made Facebook profiles and Second Life avatars and reviewed books at Amazon and recorded podcasts. We blogged about our candidates losing and wrote songs about getting dumped. We camcordered bombing runs and built open-source software.

America loves its solitary geniuses its Einsteins, its Edisons, its Jobses but those lonely dreamers may have to learn to play with others. Car companies are running open design contests. Reuters is carrying blog postings alongside its regular news feed. Microsoft is working overtime to fend off user-created Linux. We're looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it's just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.

Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I'm not going to watch Lost tonight. I'm going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I'm going to mash up 50 Cent's vocals with Queen's instrumentals? I'm going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?

The answer is, you do. And for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, TIME's Person of the Year for 2006 is you.

Sure, it's a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary. Web 2.0 harnesses the stupidity of crowds as well as its wisdom. Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.

But that's what makes all this interesting. Web 2.0 is a massive social experiment, and like any experiment worth trying, it could fail. There's no road map for how an organism that's not a bacterium lives and works together on this planet in numbers in excess of 6 billion. But 2006 gave us some ideas. This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them. Go on. Tell us you're not just a little bit curious.

DC Metro Police

2006-12-14T13:42:00.000-05:00

This happened to one of my best friends who just so happens to be of Pakistany origen. By the way he actually was born and grew up in OHIO. Way to go Metro and DC Police.

"Last week I entered the metro with my wife. As usual, we were in haste and wanted to just board the train by making our way through the crowded gates.
I have a Smart-card and replenish it once every 2 weeks.
As i walked through the gate, i had -$0.30 on my card. If anyone has a Smartcard, they know that the card lets you be negative to a certain amount, but when you refill the card you have to make up the difference. That is a benefit of the Smart Card.
But Officer BF Johnson didn't think so. He stopped me in my tracks, ordered me to approach him. He then ordered me to hand over my license and called the station to check for any suspicious (Obviously terror-related) activity from my end. He was telling me "you are riding on a negative balance, you are stealing from the metro". Yeah, lets call this in...this is a serious "crime" and we need to check what this rider's past crimes are. Officer BF Johnson was surprised when a blond Ukrainian lady followed me, while telling her "ill be with you in a second ma'am". Well, she defended me and he must have been horrified to see a Pakistani married to a Ukraine? This isnt supposed to happen! I was never taught to react in this situation!!!! Well, obviously he has no clue how the Smart Card works but, he still kept me there for almost 10 minutes while he verified with all significant sources that this crafty/sneaky metro rider is clean to the bone. He handed me a a nice warning while reading from it "i have the right to detain you". This shameful rider will never cheat my way through anything in life...not with the BF Johnson's defending the illustrious Metro institutes's best interests."

Location: Tenleytown Metro, Washington DC

Enterprise Ajax

2006-12-11T22:40:00.000-05:00

Like any new web technology there is sometimes the misconception that it can be used and implemented within the enterprise the same as with public consumer web applications. This is natural because these consumer-facing applications often are constrained the way enterprises are and can act on new technologies and approaches faster. This is true with Ajax.

Think of a car analogy. If you put a fancy Ferrari body on top of a Pinto frame and engine what do you have? From a distance you can say you have a Ferrari but to those who have to get up-close, interact with, and maybe even drive it; its still run’s like a Pinto.

Now consider enterprise web applications. With the coming out party of open-source Ajax widgets enterprises believe that by ‘bolting’ some of these free snippets (little Ajax eye candy pieces to make a site look and feel better to the user) onto existing apps is all that is needed to say “Yes, we’re doing Ajax.” But think about it. All that is being done is similar to the scenario above whether business managers realize it or not. If they don’t, they are really getting shortchanged on the business activity optimizing gains from Enterprise Ajax.

To garner the full benefits, enterprises need to carefully calculate how to implement an Ajax enterprise strategy that not only provides the basic improved user experience but can enhance the entire set of capabilities as well. Enterprise Ajax is in fact an architectural strategy so as to marry the best of what Ajax has to offer with enterprise architectures such as SOA while making sure that security, scalability, reliability and governance are correctly taken care of. Enterprise Ajax enables enterprises to leverage the best of Rich Internet Applications and Service-Oriented enterprise Applications with the specific goal of optimizing any and all business operations of an enterprise while guarding access by authorized people to the correct information assets and ensuring delivery and proper execution.

AJAX, the Enterprise, and SOA—A Look Into the Future

2006-12-10T12:06:00.000-05:00

Get an overview of the next frontier of AJAX development: the enterprise, where AJAX components can be the Web 2.0 front end of a SOA.

Consumer Web sites such as Google Maps and Yahoo Mail generally come to mind first when one thinks of AJAX-enabled applications. On those sites, millions of users experience the results of dynamic AJAX interaction between the browser and server. Less known, however, are the benefits AJAX can deliver to application development inside the enterprise. So vendors in the burgeoning enterprise AJAX space, many of whom are watching the recent AJAX and rich Internet application (RIA) buzz define a technology category they have been working in for years, must educate the market. How do enterprise developers who are loath to delve into JavaScript code incorporate the technology quickly? Which applications make sense for AJAX solutions? How can internal, non-consumer AJAX Web applications benefit business?

DevX spoke with six of these vendors to get an overview of this next frontier of AJAX development:

* Backbase – makers of Backbase enterprise AJAX software
* Helmi Technologies – makers of the Helmi Open Source RIA Platform
* ICESoft Technologies – makers of ICEFaces, a Java EE framework for AJAX applications based on JavaServer Faces
* JackBe – makers of the enterprise AJAX development and runtime environment, NQ Suite, and the Presto rich enterprise application platform
* Nexaweb – makers of the Enterprise Web 2.0 Suite of products for Java-based AJAX development
* TIBCO General Interface – makers of General Interface (GI) toolkit for building desktop application-like Web applications

Robert Lepack, VP of marketing for ICESoft, gave a break down of what enterprise customers are looking for, which seemed to ring true for the market as a whole. He said ICESoft clients are divided evenly between those migrating legacy apps to the Web and those building new RIAs. He also detailed their evaluation criteria when selecting an AJAX solution: richness of the component libraries, SOA compatibility, standard tools support, and portal integration.

There's a difference between 'AJAXified' pages and AJAX/rich Internet applications for the enterprise.—Kevin Hakman, director of product marketing for General Interface
Helmi Technologies Founder Juho Risku said, "Enterprises are basically looking for savings because of the instantaneous user experience on enterprise applications. That's the reasoning behind AJAX [deployments]." He gave the example of an enterprise application handling 500 clicks per user, per day and taking five seconds to respond to each click. With 1,000 users, that adds up to millions of seconds per year those users spend waiting.

"There's a difference between 'AJAXified' pages and AJAX/rich Internet applications for the enterprise," said Kevin Hakman, director of product marketing for General Interface. As an example, he cited H&R Block, which annually sets up 12,000 additional offices during tax season and equips them with high-productivity GI workspaces through the browser.

But how will a technology based on a scripting language perform in the enterprise application realm, traditionally the domain of powerful development platforms like Java and .NET? As Lepack stated, "There's a reason why Java is a language, and JavaScript is a scripting language."

The vendors made it clear that AJAX isn't right for every application. Nexaweb CTO and Founder Coach Wei said, "AJAX is a great technology for enhancing the performance functionality of Web-based applications in the browser [but it] is not good for much more client-centric applications [such as] the traditional PowerBuilder kind of application."

Anything that requires signal processing or complex algorithms on the client side is definitely not something AJAX should be used for.—Helmi Technologies Founder Juho Risku
For example, Hakman doesn't see AJAX used in high-throughput, algorithmic trading systems that handle portfolios with thousands of stocks. "Systems at that level of performance absolutely require some type of compiled code to execute. Obviously, JavaScript is not compiled code," he said. However, Hakman does anticipate JavaScript becoming a first-class language and cited Firefox 2.0's implementing a just-in-time compiler for JavaScript as the beginning of a trend.

"Any ERP application, that's perfectly OK with AJAX," explained Risku, but he stipulated, "Anything that requires signal processing or complex algorithms on the client side is definitely not something AJAX should be used for."

So does that mean AJAX applications won't scale well?

Risku believes application and platform design is an overlooked factor in AJAX scalability. Wei actually contends that an AJAX application should be more scalable than a traditional Web application if developed correctly, because it offloads part of the processing from the server on to the JavaScript on the client. Still, the Nexaweb chief concedes that it has its limits. "The Web itself and old HTTP Web servers, they're optimized and designed for short-lived, infrequent requests and responses coming from the client side. If your AJAX application pounds and pounds for requests very frequently, that is not a scenario HTTP Web servers are optimized for traditionally."

JackBe CTO John Crupi offered a different perspective, as his product is an SOA service consumer. "The front end will be AJAX, but ultimately if you really want to get the performance and scalability you need for enterprise apps, you have to have a framework that extends into the backend enterprise. In our view, that backend extension is using SOA as the data service provider," he said.

JavaScript programming expertise is rather limited. It's a very complex programming model and actually very cumbersome and labor-intensive.—Backbase CEO Jouk Pleiter
The vendors were also quick to point out that although JavaScript has limitations, it is far from simple. JavaScript has gained a reputation among many developers as a messy and cumbersome language. As such, each AJAX vendor abstracts the developer from the raw JavaScript with either proprietary syntaxes or markup languages. For example, JackBe employs a declarative markup language, JackBe Markup Language (JBML), Backbase has an XML-based language BXML and a tag library of AJAX functions, and Nexaweb employs the XAP declarative framework.

Backbase Co-Founder and CEO Jouk Pleiter echoed most of his counterparts when he said, "JavaScript programming expertise is rather limited. It's a very complex programming model and actually very cumbersome and labor-intensive. A framework like Backbase tries to hide away the complexity."

Adding to the complexity is the fact that AJAX development currently lacks standards. This is an issue all six of the companies DevX spoke with (and some 49 others) are trying to address collectively through the Open AJAX Alliance, an industry body whose mission is promoting interoperability among the multitude of AJAX widgets, components, and libraries.

"The Open AJAX Alliance is taking all of the vendors and saying 'Let's not fragment the market the way Web service standards bodies did and have competing standards,'" said Crupi. "The first step is to support interoperability. You should be able to intermix various widgets and frameworks and not have a problem."

Backbase chief Pleiter also advocates for a single common API that can serve as a basic language specification for all AJAX solution vendors. As he sees it, even if all the different AJAX implementations could cooperate, each would still have its own API. He said, "We now have 200 different APIs for 200 different check problems, which is clearly way too fragmented [and] clearly doesn't drive for any standardization."

A flurry of open source activity has occurred in the AJAX market.
Today, many of the vendors' products already support widely used open source toolkits such as Dojo and DWR as interoperable add-ons to their native libraries. A majority of the companies DevX spoke with have even released their own products as open source projects. In just the past few months, a flurry of open source activity has occurred in the AJAX market:

* Helmi launched the first beta of its Open Source RIA Platform v2.0.
* ICESoft released ICEfaces under an open source license.
* Nexaweb initiated XAP (the eXtensible Ajax Project) through the Apache Software Foundation.
* TIBCO released General Interface 3.2 under an open source license.

Although the vast majority of freely available frameworks, toolkits, and libraries on the AJAX landscape—Helmi estimates 1,500 in all—aren't involved in the interoperability effort, most of the vendors feel confident that the ones that matter are. Hakman predicted that fewer than 10 would emerge as broadly adopted, and Pleiter said, "I think 80 percent of the stuff doesn't even qualify to remain in the marketplace because it's just a small fragment, it's just a piece of code. They are not viable options, especially in the enterprise."

Helmi Founder Risku added, "Most of the platforms are such that no one even knows that they are there. There definitely will be a lot of consolidation happening."

If the Open AJAX Alliance is successful, however, Hakman sees the Java platform as a model of what AJAX could become. "Like in Java with JSP, Swing, and Spring, you've got a different tool for different tasks within that context. The idea is [that] AJAX is just an ecosystem with a number of large frameworks and toolkits that are broadly adopted, but plenty of room for more [vendors] that make specialized widgets."

InfoWorld: JackBe Beats TIBCO in Ajax Tools Evaluation

2006-12-05T16:05:00.000-05:00

Read the full story here
Infoworld