Is Acrylic going to be PhotoShop killer from M$? Acrylic is based on Expression, the graphics application Microsoft acquired with its 2003 purchase of Hong Kong company Creature House. You can download an evaluation version here...
The expanse of white space at the bottom of Google's main Web page, possibly the most valuable undeveloped real estate in cyberspace. Not anymore...
Couple of articles on Google Fusion:
1. NY Times
2. eWeek
An in-progress collection of AJAX patterns being collected and discovered by Michael Mahemoff
In March, the Federal Communications Commission took a significant step toward breaking an industry deadlock over setting a single standard for a new wireless technology called ultrawideband, or UWB...
“While traditional radio technologies have transmitted and received analog signals only on specific frequencies, UWB uses inexpensive computing power to send short radio pulses across much of the radio spectrum. Because it does not use a single frequency, UWB offers several advantages, including the capacity to send high volumes of information quickly and the ability to share frequencies and resist interference. It's like breaking a truck's cargo into loads small enough to be carried on bicycles that can weave through a traffic jam.”
[Via NY Times: Requires Free Registration]
On Monday, Microsoft announced 'Metro', a new document management technology that will be a part of its Longhorn OS. Xerox has also announced support for Metro, which is an open format that allows users to share, print and archive paginated-layout documents and used in document workflows.
Looks like Google is planning to take on A9 heads on with its own book search feature called Google Print.
Well, the more the merrier, right?
Amazon is taking on Google with a new search site called A9.
While Google concentrates on simplicity and delivering the most relevant search results in the shortest possible time, A9 is adding the experience face to the process of conducting a web search by providing various facets like related movies and books.
While A9 still relies on the Google to provide its basic search results, integrating it with Amazon's 'Search inside Book' feature, has made this into a really powerful search engine. While Google still relies on the Internet for data, A9 is also supported by the written word. Also some of the nice to have features like 'History' and 'Bookmarks' make this an instantly likeable site...
Also read this NY Times article for more insight…
PS: I just noticed that A9 recognizes your Amazon ID...
Slightly old news, but here are a couple of links that looks into the added interest RIAs have developed as a result of this news:
BEA Alchemy is an IE (browser) plugin that is being developed as a way to deliver rich data to thin clients and also help them work in an 'Occasionally Connected' mode. Jon Udell in this article says:
“The caching scheme is the heart and soul of Alchemy. Current approaches to taking browsers offline typically queue messages that later update in a server-based data model. An Alchemy application, though, always works with a genuine local data model that it stores as sets of XML fragments and navigates in a relational style. Bosworth’s hunch is that a Web-style thin client, driven by a rich data model intelligently synchronized with the services cloud, could do most of what we really need — both offline and online. ”
Looks like Alchemy in combination with Liquid Data is going to give Macromedia Central and Flex a run for their money....
Somewhat old news, but I'm still catching up these days ;)
According to this article the latest update to Windows will be available to all users - including those using pirated copies of its Windows XP software. Is it really altruism that prompted this move? Hmn...
Postscript: In comments Dominic points out another article which clarifies the MS position - More MS like - "Microsoft Corrects: No XP SP2 for Pirated Copies"
Random surfing can at times reveal some good links. Today I found a link to this introduction to CMMi via Rob Grzywinski's site.
The CMMi is a model for improving and appraising the performance of development organizations. It stands for “Capability Maturity Model Integration”. At Digité, we have a tool that helps organizations gain visibility into their projects and processes. Worth checking out if your organization is following CMMi or any other process, if you are interested in knowing more read this whitepaper.
Brendan Eich had written some time back that Mozilla was looking to forge alliances with GNOME and other Open Source Projects to combat Longhorn. So looks like a meeting was held and the opensource community is gearing itself to combat Longhorn.
This news comes a bit too late, but I'm posting it in any case.
Jeremey Z in this post talks how Orkut is strategically important for Google
Makes a lot of sense...
OK now the extension. With GMail in the picture, now you can easily use the Orkut network for populating address books. And come too think of it, that is a lot of behavioral information that Google could potentially have access to.
All this of course translates to a whole lot of advertising $$$.
Hmn... so when are they going IPO?
Macromedia’s server-side products have never quite enjoyed the same kind of success that it’s desktop applications have (the exception being Cold Fusion, but then it was already quite successful before it became a part of the Macromedia stable.)
So with the release of Macromedia Flex, is this equation going to change?
Not sure.
Firstly, there is a very similar product in Laszlo Presentation Server that has been around for a while. But despite its potential, I’m not sure if Laszlo has made quite the impact it was hoping to. Flex is definitely has a advantage in Brady (the MXML editor) but the real challenge for application developers would be to justify the cost of an additional application server just to render the UI which in turn requires a plugin on the client.
Somehow, I’m finding this a little difficult to justify. Had the same problem justifying Generator development about four years ago. But then that was the dot.com boom time, and funding an ambitious online application was slightly easier than it is now. So the question is, will Flex go the Generator way?
Found this via Rajesh's site. Interestingly the headline says 16 hard truths but lists 18...
Cringely believes that obfuscation is the key to .NET’s survival and an Euclid, Ohio based company called PreEmptive Solutions holds the key to the technology. Interesting thoughts, and the technology behind the ‘morphing’ lines of code does look very interesting. If Cringely is to be believed, there may be a gold rush on to own a piece of PreEmptive…
Don Park's Daily Habit: Longhorn Aero UI Sampler
I just ran across this nice set of Longhorn UI related articles, officially titled Aero User Experience Guidelines: Sampler for PDC 2003. Links to the meat are under What's Inside? heading. Some good ideas, some questionable, but all good looking. I am starting to get a little sick of all the gradients though and the huge titlebar seem wasteful. I wonder what usability tests caused them to make the title bar much bigger?
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Category: Technical
The two main predictions according to this report are that 1. Standards and service-oriented applications will permeate IT and 2. Web services will allow enterprises to improve the way they interact, and develop, sell and support products. Also in the report:
“By 2006, Web services will take hold as a competitive differentiator in business relationships and product innovation. Enterprises that want to remain competitive will need to use Web services to provide commonly requested data to their partners. It is imperative that enterprises develop a strategy for how to use Web services to develop products, including hard goods, digital goods and services.”
In this Infoworld article Ephraim Schwartz looks into the challenges of managing outsourced development and how companies will have to develop new roles and new processes that help manage these outsourced initiatives. Quoting the article:
“Long term, IT will need to change its research and development and PLM (product lifecycle management) processes to adapt to this outsource model, say both Kelly and Murphy. IT will need to refocus its skills on business analytics and strategy.
The ability to negotiate a change request will be of equal importance to technical skills, if not more so. And, though ultimately you may want to treat the outsource firm as your engineering team and you may want that process to be transparent, there will be new tasks to delegate, with time zone and language barriers thrown in for good measure. If you can’t walk down the hall, you need new processes to make sure things get done. From what I can tell, this is not something the computer science schools currently focus on. ”
This is exactly what we are tackling at Digité. Our platform allows enterprises to gain complete visibility into all their outsourcing initiatives while allowing them to adapt different processes with changing business needs...
Scoble points out to a Longhorn Demo that takes you through a sample Real Estate Application using Avalon (the vector based renderer) Indigo (reliable Messaging) and a host of other web services which form the basis of the Service Oriented Architecture behind longhorn. All this is quite exciting in terms of technology, but it is introducing the same kind of challenges that Flash had during its early days with respect to consistent user interfaces. The zoomable map using a magnifying glass that enlarges the area underneath it, reminded me of so much of the early Flash days, when such effects were considred cool. Avalon might go though a similar phase where developers will be so much in awe of what is possible that they might go ahead a design interfaces without actually thinking whether the interfaces are actually usable. By the way, couldn't the Linux/J2EE group use a combination of Flash and Webservices (read Central) to achieve what Longhorn is aiming to do without having to re-write anything?
MetaFilter: I (can see into the future), Cringely
Robert X. Cringely's Predictions for 2004 : first he updates readers on his 2003 predictions (80% accuracy) and then dishings 15 new techie prophecies.
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Scoble believes that Longhorn is going to be such a radical paradigm shift, that Microsoft cannot call it Windows. After all it has a brand new UI, it is completely SOA, and most importantly, apps designed for Longhorn will not be backward compatible (though if the app is built using .NET, should it not run on XP with some small tweaks or run-time engine? Not sure...)
In any case, Scoble is also looking for a new name for this OS. Care to contribute?
Tomalak's Realm
WIRED: 101 Ways to Save the Internet. Paul Boutin. Desperate solutions range from abandoning email to requiring a license to log on. Halt, fools! The Internet's problems stem from the same virtues that make it great: open architecture, the free flow of information, peer-to-peer cooperation, and a bias for linking strangers, not disconnecting them.
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E M E R G I C . o r g: Mozilla as Platform
Linux News writes:
With user clients like e-mailers, HTML composers, calenders, debuggers, chat applications and address books, Mozilla must be far more than just a Web browser. And it is. The Mozilla Browser is built on top of the Mozilla Platform.The Mozilla Platform itself is a set of programmable objects and XML processors bound together into a single program. Applications that exploit this platform consist of images, XML and text files that are interpreted at runtime when the platform starts.
You can buy the O'Reilly book from Amazon, or just get the entire book in a zipped version from Micah Dubinko's site. In either case, I think this would be an essential read...
Tomalak's Realm
SJ Mercury: The year's lowlights and highlights in technology. Dan Gillmor. Human beings make some terrible decisions, and the malevolent among us do enormous damage, but somehow the species seems to muddle through and even make progress. That's how it looks from here as I look back at the last 12 months in technology, tech policy and overall economic matters.
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O'Reilly Network Articles: O'Reilly's Best of 2003
This year we published nearly 100 feature-length articles by O'Reilly book authors. Based on visitor statistics, we've come up with our top 10 most popular articles of 2003. But wait, there's more. We've also gathered our favorite tips pieces of the year. And where would we be without the books themselves? So we've also compiled a list of the year's top-sellers. What's wrong with a little shameless, year-end promotion? Enjoy.
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The guys who invented JSP are now playing around with a new technology, that looks very promising. XAML is the MS implementation of an XML based UI definition (there are others ranging from XUL to WSUI) and since it will be packaged into Longhorn, it could change the way application UIs will evolve over the next few years. Xamlon is a runtime library that executes XAML for the .NET framework. Although not 100% XAML compatible, I think there is potential here.
I'm not to sure how web applications will evovle over the next couple of years now that technologies like XUL, Flex/Laszlo and XAML are making their presence felt. Does this mark the beginning of the end of the DHTML based Web Application?
[via Jeremy Allaire]
Tomalak's Realm
Fast Company: 5 Tech Innovators. Scott Kirsner. They work in fields as diverse as portable power, biotechnology, and information visualization. Who's working on something really new? Here are five compelling answers.
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O'Reilly Network Articles: JPEG2000: the Killer Image File Format for Lossless Storage
Is JPEG2000 the killer image file format for lossless storage? Ken Milburn thinks so. In this article, Ken details the options available in the JPEG2000 plug-in, which have been designed to help photographers losslessly compress and store the highest-quality images as efficiently as possible. Ken is the author of the upcoming Digital Photographer's Handbook.
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Big Mac, the terascale cluster built entirely out of Macintosh computers is officially the third fastest super computer notes this Wired article.
However its 10.3 teraflop speed may soon be eclipsed by a dishwasher sized super computer being built by IBM which may clock up to 360 teraflops. By comparison, the fastest machine today clocks just 35 teraflops and is the size of four tennis courts. And it is expected to run on Linux…
Came across this old article by Jon Udell on Infoworld, that calls to elevate scripting languages like ActionScript, JavaScript and Python to a more respectful level.
“I am not only saying that you can do what used to be called "systems programming" in what used to be called a "scripting language" -- although you sometimes can. Nor am I merely lauding Python as a spectacular implementation of a first-class scripting language -- although it is one. My point is that languages like Python, but also Perl, Ruby, and JavaScript/JScript/ActionScript/EcmaScript, are strategic in ways that we don't yet fully acknowledge.”
I do agree they really do deserve more importance in the development process but the idea of using prototypes as final products does seem a bit too revolutionary.
They are very useful if used in pilot studies, and should be built in such a way that most of it can be leveraged. It still may not be possible with current development tools, but it would be great to have one like that. Develop in a scripting language and deploy in Java/C++.
E M E R G I C . o r g: Best of 2003
Popular Science has the 10 best innovations/inventions of 2003. Among them: 802.11g and the Mitsubishi MegaView Wall.
MetaFilter
Apple: Innovator & Oppressor of Independent Software: As they once did with Karelia's Watson software and, to a certain extent, Panic's Audion, Apple has "borrowed" a concept from an independent, third-party developer without credit or compensation. It would seem that Steve Jobs is not as far removed from Bill Gates as he would like the Mac faithful to believe . . .
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Robert Cringely looks at how Microsoft has consistently failed to understand the meaning and the power of open source software:
Will it be too late by the time realization strikes? Or is it too late already?
[via Slashdot]
Wifinetnews notes that Dal Lake is soon become un-wired:
Edit: As noted in the comments, a Shikara is a Kashmiri Houseboat and Dal lake used to be a tourist hot spot till terrorism became an issue in Kashmir. Also it is interesting to note that cellphones became legal in Kashmir only a few months ago...
Virginia Tech is combining the power of 1,100 Apple computers, the Terascale Cluster project is bringing Virginia Tech to the forefront in the supercomputing arena.
Read the NY Times report about it.
Adam Bosworth explores the various ways in which occasionally connected devices and programs can work while delivering an agreeable user experience.
I think there are loads of good ideas there for building Central applications. Also I think Central should be available for PDAs as well as this is where occasionally connected computing really comes in handy...
PS: He asks where do expert bloggers find the time to keep posting daily...
Frankly, I've no idea ;)
This NY Times article points to the new range of N-Gage phones from Nokia
When those cool gizmo digital watches were release in the late 70s, it seemed like that is what people in the future would want (calculator watch, anybody?). Look at your wrists today, how many of you wear those watches? Will the phones have the same fate? Now I'm not suggesting N-Gage is doomed. In fact I think it is a cool gadget, but sell it as a game, don't include the phone in it.
Jon Udell looks at what the implication of getting richer UIs on applications means. He talks about his user experience with Windows 2003 as an example
<quote>
Jon is right to some extent. We desperately need to simplify the interactions. This would call for newer UI paradigms. Some that are much simpler and can effectively display information and expose functionalities. Jon gives Sam’s Fisheye Menu as an example. The disadvantage of introducing new interactions for existing functionality is that people need time to get used to them. And the best way to get used to them is if the interactions are present in the OS itself. Apple has been leading the way on this front. I and certainly wish for Apple to separate the OS and the hardware or at least, there should be an alternative to the MS OS (I know, I know, Linux) that can really lead the way with pioneering interaction design.
Apple just announced a Windows version of their iTunes music player. This is great news. One of the main reasons behind doing this of course would be to open up the iTunes Store for PC users. Anyway, I'm just downloading the player. Will let you know how good it really is after I've played around a bit...
It's probably the most ill kept secret that Microsoft are trying to spread beyond computers by becoming the de-facto platform for everything from PDAs, Phones to TV. And as per this NY Times article, the industry is watching to see whether Microsoft, as it enters middle age, can be innovative enough to compete effectively in software platforms beyond the personal computer.
One example is a TV delivery service based on Internet standards that allows carriers to deliver new pay TV services over existing high-speed Internet connections. An experimental model of the system will be on display for the first time at the show in Geneva and the technology will be tested by phone companies in Canada and India, said Ed Graczyk, director of marketing for Microsoft TV.
Wonder if the bandwidth in India will be good enough. Reliance, the company which MS has tied up with, is currently undergoing a lot of teething problems. But this is one thing to watch out for.
Researchers at Duke U are doing some interesting experiments with neural interfaces and monkeys:
[via Boing Boing]
Jon Udell at InfoWorld has this interesting article that looks at the pros and cons within Flash, Infopath and Mozilla as platforms for developing Internet Applications. Jon tends to feel Mozilla offers a lot strategically. I tend to agree with Jon. XUL is truly cool and Mozilla Firebird is a great browser, but as long as it does not catch on, I believe Flash is the strongest contender for RIAs
E M E R G I C . o r g: More on Project Green
News.com writes on Microsoft's Project Green to create software to map out business management applications.
Microsoft is linking the release of major new versions of its business management applications to the debut of the next generation of its Windows operating system [Longhorn, scheduled to ship in 2005].By spending nearly $2.5 billion on buying United States-based Great Plains and Denmark-based Navision, Microsoft set itself up to compete in the market for wide-ranging software packages designed to automate corporate bookkeeping, human resources and other business tasks...While the two major acquisitions propelled Microsoft into that market, they left the company with a patchwork of software products that operate on different technologies and that cannot easily be made to work together. Project Green is designed to meld that patchwork into a single set of interconnected applications, with Microsoft rebuilding the software on its own technology.
In the meantime, Microsoft is readying a slew of new software that's aimed at product manufacturers. One, called Demand Planner, is designed to help companies coordinate their production activity, using sales forecasts and other market data. The software will be available by the end of this year, according to Mike Frichol, a Microsoft Business Solutions general manager.
Also set to debut is Microsoft Business Network, a software hosting service that's designed to help companies shuttle inventory, shipping and order information to trading partners via Internet-based technology.
E M E R G I C . o r g: B2B Update
Forbes has a special report on the world of B2B (business-to-business ecommerce). During the Internet boom era of the 1990s, B2B was the magic wand that would change everything. Then, the buzz faded. Now, it is making a comeback as a "basic business tool". From the introduction:
What many of the early B2B cheerleaders failed to grasp and what the Rayovacs of the world are grappling with today is the fact that pricing is merely one element in the highly complex relationships along supply chains. Reliability, speed and innovation matter too but in as many different ways as there are companies.Make no mistake, though, the B2B revolution is happening just not on the terms originally envisioned. Instead of upstart exchanges taking the ramparts, industry incumbents are leading the charge. Firms like Wal-Mart, Dell and Cisco are nudging, and sometimes forcing, suppliers to make nitty-gritty changes that are glamorous only when they reach the bottom line.
But reach it they can. The technologies that companies install to communicate with their partners can reduce supply chain costs by half, says the Yankee Group. That helps explain why companies are increasing spending on such technologies by 100% to 150% annually even as they cut back on overall information technology budgets. In fact, B2B commerce has actually grown despite the bursting of the stock market bubble that once surrounded it. Worldwide, e-business activity is to grow five-fold in three years to $1.4 trillion in 2003 and then is expected to nearly double again to $2.4 trillion next year, figures e-business research firm Emarketer.
SPB Software house is building a supercomputer using 12 pocket PCs.
Quote:
“The idea is quite simple: there are eleven Pocket PCs that act as nodes of the cluster, and these devices actually perform all the calculations. There is one additional device that is controlling the others, giving them small pieces of information to process, and collecting the results of each node's calculations.”
E M E R G I C . o r g: Patents
NYTimes writes:
Petra Moser, now an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, has come up with some surprising conclusions [in her Ph. D thesis] that are attracting the attention of fellow scholars.One of Professor Moser's conclusions is that developing countries like India, which is scheduled to come into full compliance with an international patent treaty in 2005, may be better off without strong patent laws.
The conventional wisdom among economists has been that a robust patent system helped transform the United States into an economic powerhouse. And this may be true. But, Professor Moser concludes, what was good for America and Britain in the 19th century is not necessarily good for emerging, largely rural economies in countries like Denmark, the Netherlands and Switzerland.
"In economics, we are taught that patent laws are what create incentives for innovation," she said. "But many of the best innovators in what was the high technology of the day came from some of the smallest countries in Europe, and these nations did not have patent laws."
The purpose of patents is twofold: to protect the inventor and to speed technological progress. Thus, patent laws require that an inventor, in a quid pro quo exchange for the limited monopoly that a patent provides, disclose his methods to others. "Countries without patent laws have much larger shares of their innovations where patenting would have been a bad idea," Professor Moser said.
So what is the lesson for Brazil, China, India and other countries that are being pressed by industrialized nations to create strong patent systems?
"We try to force patent laws on developing countries
and say, This is best for you," she said. "Then we are surprised when they say they don't want patent laws. But they have a point. Such laws could actually hinder innovation in those countries."
VentureBlog: It's The End Of The Web As We Know It And I Feel Fine
I'm at the RVC SoftEdge Conference, where I'll be speaking tomorrow. RVC is the former venture arm of Reuters and this is its technology conference. The discussion here is wide ranging but generally around the evolution of information technology.
During one of the breaks I was speaking with a senior scientist who is intimately familiar with the plumbing of the web and is currently in command of a key piece of that infrastructure. On assurance of anonymity, he described for me what he views as a nail in the coffin of email communications as we know it. According to this scientist, SoBig and other spam bots, which he argues were designed to overwhelm spam filtering software, have so confounded AOL's email infrastructure that it has left the future of email in jeopardy. The volume of spam being sent by these autonomous spambots around the web is so great that, according to the scientist, AOL's email infrastructure has been brought to its knees this past Saturday, Monday and again today. As my source told me, AOL was ultimately forced for the first time to call upon others at the key choke-points around the web for assistance in solving this problem -- a problem which led the head of AOL's infrastructure group to state "the walls are falling in around us."
Just how bad is it? According to my source "it is the end of the Web as we know it." Despite massive efforts to trace SoBig and its progeny back to their source and to unravel the code necessary to turn these spam machines off, neither AOL nor other interested parties around the web have had any success and may never. If that is the case, the sheer volume of spam as a percentage of overall Internet traffic will make untrusted email communications completely unviable as a form of communication. Spam filters will necessarily be overwhelmed but email
traffic without those filters will be impossibly unmanageable and therefore useless.
I have no way of knowing how much of what I am being told is true (although I will say that my source is certainly in a position to know) but it is certainly tragic if it is correct. As someone who relies so heavily upon email as the ultimate form of communication (first and foremost, because it is asynchronous, so I can engage in it late in the evening when my kids have gone to bed), the idea that email will no longer be tenable as a productive communications medium is horrifying. It will also have a serious impact upon the world of Venture Capital. Innumerable businesses upon which we are pitched each day and hundreds of which we have all funded are premised upon the viability of email as a communication tool (be it for knowledge management, collaboration, etc.). While a new frontier of trusted web communications will undoubtedly create numerous opportunities for technology funding, it will also leave a whole world of technology orphaned. Like any fundamental shift in technology infrastructure, this could leave a path of corporate roadkill in its wake.
NB: As a side note, I was visiting George Mueller of ColorKinetics just a couple months ago. In the course of our meeting, our conversation turned to the power of email. George passed on the theory of Ihor Lys, ColorKinetic's CTO, that smart distributed spambots would ultimately proliferate and make email communication impossible. I may have to give Ihor a ring and find out what else he's predicting.
O'Reilly Network Articles: Globalizing and Localizing Windows Application, Part 2
In his last article, Wei-Meng Lee discussed about how to localize your Windows application using the CurrentCulture property. In this article, he leads you through continuing work on localizing a Windows application so that it can now display different languages according to the culture selected.
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The article by Derrick Story seems to suggest so...
I own a Wacom which I use with my laptop, but that hardly gives me any mobility, which is what a Tablet PC is all about. Isn't it?
An in depth tutorial to building your own Segway-style self balancing scooter (Prior experience in building walking robots or rocket ships helpful.)
CNET News.com - Enterprise Hardware: India's next frontier--electronics?
Although India is more famous for its software and IT services, the country's electronics industry is poised to take off, a research firm says.
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Peter at Tabula PC blogs about his experience at a Guess Jeans store where he was ejected for using a strange looking device we all know as a Tablet PC.
Reckon these are just teething blues for a new technology, or are people getting more paranoid than ever?
A list of papers presented at Hypertext 2003…
Includes the following:
And a lot more…
[via EMERGIC]
How do these two presentation software compare? Ian F. Darwin takes a look at the two...
Here are some cool laptops to consider if you're planning to buy one in a years time...
These IBM prototypes are cool. You can actually detach the Laptop keyboard. Now ain't that sweet.
If you can't wait though, there's the new Apple Powerbooks too. Just as sweet (maybe even more.)
Would you want to use Wi-Fi at your local UPS store (was Mailboxes Etc)? It seems UPS is testing it out at 66 outlets in Chicago.
I'm not sure there would be the same kind of need as Wi-Fi at Starbucks or McDonalds. And in any case, the UPS Store in Mountain View was right next to a Starbucks. I saw people using their laptops while sipping coffee, but did not notice anybody surfing while licking stamps at MBE...
Ray Ozzie of the Lotus Notes and Groove fame has put up an example of what he believes is prior art to the Eolas patent. Meaning that, since Lotus Notes, a commercially available program was able to perform all of the functions mentioned in the patent well before the patent was awarded, the patent should be invalidated...
Can this save the browser yet?
[via Slashdot]
I've mentioned this before [1 2 3], the US software patent laws are quite unjust and open for a lot of (mis)interpretations...
M$ is getting badly beaten up on the Eolas case and for once you actually feel sorry for them!
Andrew Anker at VentureBlog points to this Forbes article on TiVo that talks about why it is not gaining the popularity it deserves. Is it suffering from the First Mover's Disadvantage?
According to Andrew, TiVo is more a feature than a product, and as a product it is very difficult to use. But it is feature whose time has come. In fact, the technology has already scared the networks into action. NBC recently announced plans to air 30-second "minimovies" during commercial breaks in hopes of keeping viewers from using their remotes or devices like TiVo to avoid advertisements.
Given the situation, it might help TiVo to address the usability issues soon enough, lest they lose the early movers advantage (or disadvantage...)
Zeepe 7 was released today and here's what they have to say:
A week ago Jerry Mead sent me an example of what he was able to achieve with Zeepe, and how quickly it helped him convert a web page into a desktop app...
I still need to download a copy to evaluate...
I wonder how it compares to Central.
The SunSpot looks at the perils of living in a society that requires you to remember difficult to remember passwords...
I'm not sure what your opinions about software patents are but I think they are evil. It seems the EU software community agrees with me, and they have protested against a recent vote for software patents in EU...
We have re-branded ourselves. It used to be Tufan, now it is Digité.
At Digité we are committed to enabling a global workforce by helping enterprises improve the way they work. Our software is aimed at improving enterprise operational efficiency. For more information about Digité's solutions, check out the products page.
OK, so now that the corporate spiel is taken care of, just wanted to let you guys know that the new look site is up, it is not all Flash, but would appreciate your feedback on it. We're ready for both bouquets and brickbats...
Not sure how many people will be sober enough to remember what you exactly said about J2EE, Jini and web services.
All the more better.
Winsupersite has more screen shots of the next version of the windows operating system... The UI looks quite cool here... Similar to the Central Interface? I don't know...
[via Viswanath Gondi]
Of course, that is what Central is all about, but one thing that make HTML attactive is the easy availability of OS controls (on Windows, Mac and Linux) this is really important for ease of development. Zeepe seems to do this on windows, wonder if it could be made cross-OS
SOA (service-oriented architecture) has become a buzzword of late. Although the concepts behind SOA have been around for over a decade now, SOA has gained extreme popularity of late due to web services. In this article Sayad Hashimi gets you started with SOA...
HP announced a new range of Digital Imaging Products and this scanner happens to be one of them:
The other notables include a 5 Mega Pixel Camera and a Photo Printer...
Robert Cringely looks into the whole India thingy and suggests that IT departments should go with Apple servers instead to improve productivity...
I think you should seriously be considering the product we are building...
[via Slashdot]
Yahoo news mentions this and Slashdot recently picked this up.
One of reasons is that IBM is promoting Linux pre-install machines heavily here. And they are pushing Linux versions over Windows versions. And corporates seem to be going for it. Another interesting company doing stuff with Linux in India is Netcore. This is run by Rajesh Jain and are into affordable Linux clusters for SMEs...
Scoble looks at the rate at which .NET user groups have been growing in India and is pretty certain that it is on it's way to becoming an IT superpower...
I'm not too sure if Flash groups are finding the same kind of response, though. I remember Brajeshwar asking me sometime back about starting one, but then I reckon the interest just died out (or maybe I was not kept in the loop...)
We do need to do something about that...
Some interesting thoughs on why WordML might come up as a web standard one of these days...
Quite valid, when you come to think of it, all you need it do develop an easy to use Macro for word and you even can easily use it to publish .doc files to you blog or website.
In fact MS has pretty much provided XML for almost all Office apps including MS Project. This is probably the first time that MS has been so open about their delivery format (sort of). Would be interesting to see how this develops.
Just picked up this Slashdot thread about a rediff.com article about a new video compression software technology...
As expected, most of the discussion on Slashdot is veering towards what is more important, drinking water or technology? Well, the answer, though obvious, is not an easy one to answer. The people who are motivated to develop technology are not the same people who are going to deliver drinking water. If you ask them to do that first and then concentrate on the technology aspect, they'd rather just give up. Both aspects need to be considered, and most of the time it will be a different set of people doing the two. That does not make this effort less important by any means....
Those are the four Indian Languages that Google is currently available in.
Very interesting. Just about 25 more Indian Languages to go...
Extract from the post:
Very well said.
There has been an interesting discussion going on about RIAs in general on WEBGUI list and a large number of XUL example emerged from it. Some of the cool ones are listed below:
XUL UI Widget Gallery
Bugxula
Mozblog
MAB Amazon Search
XUL games
XULChannel RSS Aggregator
Please feel free to add to this list...
From starting out as a Phone Hacker and going on to start the PC Revolution, Steve Woz is a definitely a well recognized genius. After spending the last few years teaching fifth grade school kids, his latest venture into hi-tech is quite... hmnn... interesting.
When I thought we finally had a browser that could stand up against IE, AOL cuts the remaining team on the project...
Is this the end? Or just the beginning?
Asks this article:
Extract:
...That’s why the phrase quoted above, about flexibility and usability, is so completely 100% wrong. Browsers are more usable because they’re less flexible."
I agree with the last statement a great deal...
So Adobe will no longer be producing the Mac version of it popular Video Editing software Premiere according to this news article...
So is Apple going to become an appliance company? Asks Andrew Anker on VentureBlog
Just picked up this thread on Slashdot which is a discussion about the .NET scene 3 years after...
Makes some interesting reading despite the obvious prejudice...
Reading Clay Shirky's article titled A Group is its Own Worst Enemy got a lot of mental threads running. This is an excellent look at Group Software and Behavioral Patterns that emerge from its usage. It's a long read, but worth it, especially if you're developing FlashComm applications...
[via Joel on Software]
Asks NY Times article. Undoubtedly, Goolge is one of the most important Internet Company today and it is going to grow in importance in the coming years. There were talks of Google and Ebay being competitors. The truth is they will soon be competing with Microsoft (In fact MS did informally bid for Google).
Now that will be an exciting battle...
Just heard about IDEO's SoMos on BBC's Click Online
Crazy stuff!!
"A federal appeals court gave Microsoft a reprieve yesterday by sweeping aside a lower court injunction that ordered the company to distribute the Java software of its rival Sun Microsystems..." says this NY Times article
Further:
Paul Thurrott has a review on his site of the next version of the Microsoft Operating System. There are a number of improvements that Microsoft is planning with Longhorn, including making it easier to use. Now that is surprising coming from Microsoft as they are largely responsible for the fact that most normal people find computers difficult to use. Looking at the preview screenshots though, did not give me a not of insight into how usable the new interface would be (it does not look too different from XP) but it is certainly good to see an initiative in this direction. Let's wait for a few more builds and see how things progress...
28 years from now Eric Kidd till wants to be a programmer and still wants to have fun programming. Based on his experience, he is trying to predict the future by looking at three scenarios:
Eric prefers a future where Open Source rules the roost, but I believe that we might not be seeing anything significantly different in the future. Microsoft may or may not be there, but there might be one or more big players. The open source community would have morphed into something else and small players would still be making significant contributions...
UML 2.0 Standard Officially Adopted at OMG Technical Meeting in Paris
The upgraded UML standard now has the following features:
Just was looking at the list of new features in PPC 2003. The list includes:
The accent seems to be on connectivity. Finally they realize the mobility is nothing without connectivity.
In related posts, read:
Windows CE Enterprise Features
IE Enhancements
Internet Week Report
Slashdot
Naval Ravikant has some interesting points on his vision of the future of technology platforms:
I agree that we will be seeing a lot more Linux based applications coming up. Also Java seems to be ruling the roost as far as app servers are concerned.
But as far as GUI is concerned, there is still a huge gap to be filled. HTML is functional, but lacks the oomph. Flash can fill this gap, but it needs to get developer friendly, and though the Royale initative is promising, I believe we need a client side technology for the UI.
Unless the Royale server is basically JRUN that can output Flash in which case only one app server is running the application (hey isn't that a good idea?)...
Apparently, the SCO group has now focused its attention on Linus Torvalds. They contend that Linus, who has overseen the development of Linux, appears to have a casual attitude toward intellectual property rights.
As an example, they point to an e-mail message exchange last August on the Linux mailing list. One programmer said there was a patent matter that "we can't just ignore."
Linus replied, "[perkele] Actually, we can, and I will."
I'm not sure where this particular bit of corporate warfare is heading towards, but it does make me feel that current IP laws are grossly inadequate and we seriously need to re-look at them.
IP laws don't seem to consider the fact that it is very rare for an idea to be unique. It's just a question of who is the first one to get a patent on it. There was the famous Turmeric Patent Case which of course is an extreme example but proves a point that Just because an idea is not patented it is unique, and vice versa.
All in all I've never believed in being over protective about stuff I do, because if I can create one unique product or invention I certainly have the capacity to create others, the money I make out of them is completely dependent on how well I market them and not how closely I guard the IP.
It's only people who are unsure about their ability to innovate who go about suing people over IP...
This is another loss to Microsoft, as the Brazilian Government has decided to migrate to Linux. While Microsoft has been trying to bribe its way through to NPO and Government Offices, things are not going as planned. First it was Munich and now Brazil. Looks like the SCO affair is actually helping Linux and not doing it any harm...
The Digital Divide reports that over 200 village in my home state of Maharashtra have gone wireless. They have formed a wireless cooperative to establish about 50 wi-fi hotspots.
The irony of the situation is that I live in the most technically advanced city in the state, and there isn't a single wireless hotspot here. So my 802.11 card is useless the moment I get out of my house...
Maybe I should shift to a village...
Some time ago I had expressed the need for a bare-bones cell phone and today the New York Times has published an article where readers have contributed models they believe are the simplest to use. In my opinion, even the most simplest one of all the analyzed models is just too difficult to use.
In this interview Matthew Berk gives his oultlook on the content management space (very, very crowded in my opinion.) He does mention Macromedia Contribute as a low cost alternative, but the bottom line according to Berk is this:
Hmnn...
These are the transcripts of interviews with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs from the D: All things digital conference. While the reporters were asked to make sure all comments and interviews were off record, the attendees had no such restriction. So the only coverage you'll find would be on blogs like Denise's
[via Dan Gillmor]
So why is a company like Microsoft interested in licensing Unix from SCO? This article made the same connection I had made a when the deal happened; they simply wanted to hurt Linux. Unfortunately, they were not prepared for the fact that SCO is actually just an administrative agent for Novell who still own the copyrights
Now that is a very interesting development. This is stuff that "High-tech thrillers" are made of -- ;)
Microsoft's much publicized strategy to use special funds to offer discounts to governments and non-profit organizations might actually back-fire.
The first example of this was when Munich decided to go with Linux instead of Windows XP.
Though the trend might not catch up so soon, as the lure of heavy discounts might sway the decision in favor of MS for some time, I see a longer lasting trend to move towards Linux. At least when it comes to Government IT departments...
I have been interested in XUL for a while now, and ever sine a friend of mine showed me what he was able to achieve over a weekend with XUL, I was completely blown away...
But still the inertia to learn something new was just too much, especially when the Technology is still non IE (read non-commercial) but this article by Harry Fuecks on SitePoint has really got me interested.
The technology looks almost tailor-made for me. XML, CSS and JavaScript...
Hey wait, isn't that exactly what SVG is like too ;)
According to this NY Times Article Qualcomm expects 6 million Indian users to move to CDMA based mobile phones. This in my opinion is just the tip of the ice-berg. With a population touching almost one billion and with a majority of the country still largely un-connected by traditional land lines, there is a huge market out there.
There two important factors to be considered though:
If mobile phones become affordable (can we get it under $25?) I don't see why people will not start using them- unless of course, they are difficult to use.
So I think the first step would be to invest some money in designing simpler to use mobile phones. This might bring down manufacturing costs too, as you can do away with features like games, calendar and even the phone book. People who can hardly read will probably never use a phone book...
Did I say hardly read? Yes, a majority of Indians are still illiterate, and more over even if they were able read their own language, you have to take into account that India is a country of many languages... So one may even have to think up of an interface with little or no text and keeps the feature list down to 2 -- a) Make calls b) Receive calls...
There, with those two things done there is a huge huge market. It might just about be the biggest thing in the telecom revolution since the invention of the telephone...
This Meet-the Makers interview with Jeremy Allaire makes a very nice read. Some very intersting thoughts on his vision of the future...
One of the points he makes is the eminent death of the browser. With Office 11 and InfoPath looking like Microsoft's steps in that direction, I really wonder whether the next generation of software will be nothing more than an extended client-server model. Where the client is a web-veneered Office based Application and the server residing somewhere else over the Internet...
One important step taken by Macromedia in this direction is the announcement of Macromedia Central. But it's too early to make predictions yet...
On the internet, as anywhere else, public opinion does matter a lot. So if your site/web article has a lot of following, chances are there would a lot of references to it on a number of websites. This in turn would give it a high Google ranking...
That is not bad, but can you really use this to give new meanings to already existing terms? Geoffrey Numberg seems to think so. This article in th New York Times goes on to discuss the pros ands cons of having an "uniquely democratic web"...
The article concludes by saying:
But one of the most important sites that Google uses for its Page Rank is DMOZ and because this is human controlled (supposedly by experts/followers of a particular field), there might be more truth to Google's search results than Numberg actually leads us to believe.
All the new stuff going on at Google Labs looks very interesting. The new experiments include:
It's great to see this commitment to innovation from a company.
Jupiter Research has quite recently given all analysts personal weblogs where they can blog about the latest happenings in the industry. I think that is a real cool idea.
While on the site, I came across Matthew Berk's weblog. Matthew has been quite bullish about Flash and RIAs in general for a long time. Here is Matthew's look at the RIA space, and not surprisingly Flash figures on top of that list.
...followed closely by Laszlo.
There was a time when content management was an expensive solution and publishing regular updates was an option available only to websites willing to invest in an expensive CMS. Enter blogs, and today, the power to publish is in the hands of everybody (including nobodies like me.) It’s a wonderful feeling to be able to manage content (or ‘microcontent’ as people like to call it) on your site with such ease and at the same time have access to an online repository of all your thoughts and findings. If you have been keeping a blog, sooner or later you’ll find yourself checking your own archives for that nice tidbit you posted a few months back, but can’t summon up anymore.
There have been a number of developments in the blogging scene. Pyra Labs was bought by Google and Sixapart have found some serious money coming their way via Neoteny. Does this mean that blogging is going to be next big wave? Or is this going to be the start of a ‘blog bubble’? Nothing can be said for sure but there definitely is a great potential that exists here. One of the most promising opportunities I see is the arrival of a new breed of blogs – The Enterprise Blog.
Imagine giving knowledge workers/domain experts within an organization the ability to publish their know-how without actually having any web-publishing know-how! And consequently imagine another employee within the organization with the need for the particular piece of information actually being able to retrieve the information without even having to get in touch with the domain expert. What is more important though, is the fact that the knowledge remains within the enterprise, even if knowledge worker does not.
Apart from being an enterprise knowledge repository, I’ve seen a number of software evangelists use blogs (Macromedia and Microsoft being amongst them.) Guy Kawasaki would probably would have really loved it if MacWorld was a blog (is it?)
And finally there is an ocean of personal blogs on the net that may contain information that is very relevant to an enterprise, and thus giving them the ability to leverage knowledge and talent from outside the enterprise, at little or no cost!
Whatever the motivation, it does make sense for enterprises to leverage blogging as a productivity tool or a supplement to their existing IS infrastructure. As to how exactly these tools will be adopted by enterprises remain to be seen.
Meanwhile, I really see an opportunity here to come up with some interesting Flash based visualization that will help analyze linkages and even geographical distribution of knowledge (a la ‘world as a blog’.)
Here are some related readings:
Emergic
Padwan
IT-director - via Emergic
John Lawlor on Business Blogging
Jon Udell - The conversational Enterprise
Jon Udell - Publishing a project Weblog
Jumping the corporate blog wagon
Sacramento Bee
Man gets sacked for blogging
I had a wonderful meeting yesterday with Rajesh Jain who is running Netcore these days. Most of the talk revolved around what Netcore was up to. Which is a lot. After all, Rajesh is a person brimming with ideas.
Affordable computing is a wonderful idea that Netcore is focusing upon, and it has a lot of potential in a country like India. The concept is a simple extension of Moore’s Law. Given that processor speeds are expected to double every 18 to 24 months, you can gain access to old computers for almost throw away prices (the monitor costing the bigger portion.) Now this relatively slow computer is used as a thin client while a much better computer acts as the thick server, and does all the number crunching. This is a bit like of combining Larry Ellison’s ‘Network Computer’ with Jeff Raskin's original dream of the Macintosh. And what Ellison will really like about this, is that it runs a non-Microsoft OS.
In fact, the entire system leverages Open Source technologies to the maximum. It runs on Linux, uses openOffice and similar open source applications. So for around Rs. 20,000 ($400) Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) can have an completely integrated solution.
But Rajesh sees the main potential in delivering this technology to India's large rural population. There have been a number of initiatives aimed at rural India (a lot of them conducted by Media Lab Asia) but none have really made the difference. Could this be the one to?
The other thing that Rajesh is passionate about is blogging. We talked a bit about developments at sixapart and shared our favorite blogs. Rajesh also runs blogstreet, a site that keeps a track of blogs and links to and from it. It uses this information to rank blogs and create blog neighborhood information. So when you search for a blog on blogstreet, you’ll also get information on all the people who blog-roll it. There is also a visual view to all this information, which is really cool.
And finally there was the Linux based, blog aggregator. Very cool stuff. I’ve put Rajesh’s Blog on my must read list, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what he’s up to next…
A few days ago I download the Laszlo Presentation Server (LPS). There had been a lot buzz about this product, which incidentally is only about two weeks old, and as per the email I received from them, has only had a closed developer release as of now. This explained why the download was not available freely on the site. Overall, my user experience with the whole process of getting the server and installing it was really good. The server itself is not too heavy (17 odd MB for the DR version which has Jakarta Tomcat bundled with it) and after I got it installed, I was able to get working with LZX files right away. The help on the site is not yet complete (they do warn you about this) but there is enough information to get you started.
Anybody who has used XML, and JavaScript/ActionScript before should be able to get a handle of LPS pretty easily. There are basic tags that define UI elements like <canvas>, <button>, <text> and <window> which help you build your application and new components or classes can be included (using <include>) easily extending the capabilities of the API.
The scripting language is ECMAscript based and since the definition is XML based, you cannot really use the less than and greater than signs, so all scripts have to be included into a <![CDATA]> tag, very much like SVG in fact. They have included a debug extension with the API so you can debug your application just like you’d use the trace function if Flash. There is no visual IDE, so you’ll have to use EditPlus or whatever your favorite text editor is to write out the code. Also since it’s all XML, you can also use XML spy to write out the code. I used my favorite – TextPad.
The version that I download uses Tomcat as the servelt engine, but I should imagine that it does work with any other Appservers as well.
I have not done any extensive testing on the server so I cannot at the moment comment on the performance and other issues with the server. But here is quick SWOT analysis that might help you:
Strength: There is currently a demand for richer web based applications and a lot of industry experts are touting that Flash would be filling in this need. Laszlo is betting on this increase in Flash based RIAs and hopes it would be seen as a more painless solution since they would not have to deal with complex and animation oriented IDE that Flash presents them with. Moreover the ability to use an normal to text editor to produce Flash applications would definitely strike a chord with the Linux community who have been desperately looking for an IDE for Flash.
Weakness: This is a server-based solution a bit like what Generator used to be. In fact my first though was that this would have been a natural progression for Generator had Macromedia continued the tool. However, Macromedia did not see Generator as a viable tool to continue, would Laszlo be looked upon in a different light? Also Flash is not a standard, if you’re looking at a Standards based Enterprise Web Application development market, it would have been worthwhile to port SVG as an optional delivery platform. On the other hand this is a servlet-based solution while a majority of the Flash development community work with PHP. Would they switch to Laszlo and a Tomcat/J2EE dev environment?
Opportunities: They currently do not have any commercial competition doing exactly the same thing. Macromedia has discontinued Generator and Ming is too obscure right now to be considered as a threat. So they definitely have made the move at the right time (can’t really call this an early move though.) Also there is definitely a move to have an XML based standard for defining the application UI, so using XML was definitely the right way to go.
Threats: There are other client based UI rendering vendors like Altio and Vultus, which do not require the use of a plugin for rendering the UI. Also there is of course, Flash, which has an active and loyal developer community and support from the mother ship for web application developers. Also around the corner are other XML based U definitions like WSUI and XUL, which are slowly getting more attention.
All in all, I do believe Laszlo has come out with an interesting product and anybody developing web applications should certainly download and test-drive the presentation server. However it is just too early to make any predictions. We will have to wait for the market to mature and see who survives.
Cheers
Nav
When a group of talented individual get together to form a software company, the product better be good.
Based on all the stir about Rich User Interfaces it does seem that the web application development community is looking desperately for a richer alternative/supplement to HTML, and will Laszlo we able to provide that? Can't say for sure. The marketing spiel does sound good, but will the product live up to it? Don't know yet. I've asked for an evaluation copy, and will post my comments here once I evaluate it.
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