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"WHEN CALAMITY STRIKES The unpredictable nature of most emergencies often puts us in dangerous situations. But today's technology has come far enough to inform, alert, secure and guide us through dangerous situation, if we happen to face any. Emergencies may come in the form of environmental or circumstantial problems. Therefore it is always better to accompany yourself with at least 5 apps that can help you in case of any emergency. Here is the list of top 5 emergency apps for Android."

Comments on the latest SVN article mulling the effects of Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson's anti trust ruling and proposed break up of Microsoft. comment: "Chinese Wall" Ummm, there was a Chinese Wall between Microsoft Os and the MS Applciations layer. At least that's what Chairman Bill promised developers at a 1990 OS/2-Windows Conference I attended. It was a developers luncheon, hosted by Microsoft, with Chairman Bill speaking to about 40 developers with applications designed to run on the then soon to be released Windows 3.0. In his remarks, the Chairman described his vision of commoditizing the personal computer market through an open hardware-reference platform on the one side of the Windows OS, and provisioning an open application developers layer on the other using open and totally transparent API's. Of course the question came up concerning the obvious advantage Microsoft applications would have. Chairman Bill answered the question by describing the Chinese Wall that existed between Microsoft's OS and Apps develop departments. He promised that OS API's would be developed privately and separate from the Apps department, and publicly disclosed to ALL developers at the same time. Oh yeah. There was lots of anti IBM - evil empire stuff too :) Of course we now know this was a line of crap. Microsoft Apps was discovered to have been using undocumented and secret Window API's. http://goo.gl/0UGe8. Microsoft Apps had a distinct advantage over the competition, and eventually the entire Windows Productivity Platform became dependent on the MSOffice core. The company I worked for back then, Pyramid Data, had the first Contact Management application for Windows; PowerLeads. Every Friday night we would release bug fixes and improvements using Wildcat BBS. By Monday morning we would be slammed with calls from users complaining that they had downloaded the Friday night patch, and now some other application would not load or function properly. Eventually we tracked th

"A W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) mailing list post entitled "HTML6 proposal for single-page Web apps without JavaScript" details the proposal, dated March 20. "The overall purpose [of the plan] is to reduce response times when loading Web pages," said Web developer Bobby Mozumder, editor in chief of FutureClaw magazine, in an email. "This is the difference between a 300ms page load vs 10ms. The faster you are, the better people are going to feel about using your Website." The proposal cites a standard design pattern emerging via front-end JavaScript frameworks where content is loaded dynamically via JSON APIs. "This is the single-page app Web design pattern," said Mozumder. "Everyone's into it because the responsiveness is so much better than loading a full page -- 10-50ms with a clean API load vs. 300-1500ms for a full HTML page load. Since this is so common now, can we implement this directly in the browsers via HTML so users can dynamically run single-page apps without JavaScript?" Accomplishing the goal of a high-speed, responsive Web experience without loading JavaScript "could probably be done by linking anchor elements to JSON/XML (or a new definition) API endpoints [and] having the browser internally load the data into a new data structure," the proposal states. The browser "then replaces DOM elements with whatever data that was loaded as needed." The initial data and standard error responses could be in header fixtures, which could be replaced later if so desired. "The HTML body thus becomes a templating language with all the content residing in the fixtures that can be dynamically reloaded without JavaScript." JavaScript frameworks and JavaScript are leveraged for loading now, but there are issues with these, Mozumder explained. "Should we force millions of Web developers to learn JavaScript, a framework, and an associated templating language if they want a speedy, responsive Web site out-of-the-box? This is a huge barrier for beginners, and right n

Dion has lots to say about the recent Web 2.0 Conference. In this article he covers nine significant announcements from companies specializing in Web based mashups and the related tools for building ad hoc Web applications. This years Web 2.0 was filled with Web developer oriented services, but my favorite was MindTouch. Perhaps because their focus was that of directly engaging end users in the customization of business processes. Yes, the creation of data objects is clearly in the realm of trained developers. And for sure many tools were announced at Web 2.0 to further the much needed wiring of data objects. But once wired and available, services like MindTouch i think will become the way end users interact and create new business productivity methods. Great coverage.

"...... For awareness and understanding of the fast-growing world of mashups are significant challenges as IT practitioners, business strategists, and software vendors attempt to grapple with what's facing up to be the biggest challenge of all: The habits and expectations of the larger part of a generation of workers who don't yet realize mashups are poised to change many things about the software landscape on the Web and in the workplace. Generational changes can be difficult for businesses to embrace successfully, and while evidence that mashups are remaking the business world are still very much emerging, they certainly hold the promise..."

".... while the life of the average Web developer has been greatly improved by the availability of a wide variety of useful open APIs, the average user of the Web hasn't been a direct beneficiary except through the increase in Web apps that are built on the mashup model. And that's because the tools that empower users to weave together existing Web parts and open APIs into the exact solutions they need are just now becoming easy enough and robust enough to readily enable these scenarios. And that doesn't include the variety of

ZOHO Speaks about Chrome: "The biggest losers in Google's announcement are not really competing browsers, but competing rich client engines like Flash and Silverlight. As Javascript advances rapidly, it inevitably encroaches on the territory currently held by Flash. Native browser video is likely the last nail in the coffin - and Google needs native browser based video for its own YouTube, so we can be confident Google Chrome and Firefox will both have native video support, with Javascript-accessible VOM (video object model) APIs for web applications to manipuate video. As for Silverlight, let me just say that if Silverlight is the future of web computing, companies like us might as well find another line of work - and I suspect Google and Yahoo probably see it the same way too. More speculatively, I believe we will witness the emergence of Javascript as the dominant language of computing, as it sweeps the client side and starts encroaching on the server. The server landscape today is split between "enterprise" platforms like Java and .NET on the one side (we ourselves are in the Java camp on the server side), and "scripting" languages like PHP, Python, Ruby on the other, with Javascript firmly entrenched on the client. Languages like Ruby promise tremendous dynamism and flexibility to the developer, but their relatively weak execution environments have held them back. It is telling that both Java and .NET come with state of the art just-in-time compilers, while none of the major scripting languages do......" Interestingly, ZOHO already has a prototype running on Chrome! Solves tons of performance problems for them, as well as givign them an on-line / off-line story (Gears). The success of Chrome depends on Chrome "killer apps"; Not browser surfing features! And we already have a number of killer apps that will immediately take advantage of Chrome: gMail, gReader, gMaps and Google Docs! ZOHO will no doubt use Chrome to put themselves squarely i

"According to the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, "Passwords are a common form of authentication and are often the only barrier between a user and your personal information. There are several programs attackers can use to help guess or 'crack' passwords, but by choosing good passwords and keeping them confidential, you can make it more difficult for an unauthorized person to access your information.""

"According to the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team, "Passwords are a common form of authentication and are often the only barrier between a user and your personal information. There are several programs attackers can use to help guess or 'crack' passwords, but by choosing good passwords and keeping them confidential, you can make it more difficult for an unauthorized person to access your information.""

Excellent commentary from Nova Spivak; about as well thought out a discussion as i've ever seen concerning the future of the desktop. Nova sees the emergence of a WebOS, most likely based on JavaScript. This article set off a fire storm of controversy and discussion, but was quickly lost in the dark days of late August/September of 2008, where news of the subsequent collapse of the world financial system and the fear filled USA elections dominated everything. Too bad. this is great stuff. ..... "Everything is moving to the cloud. As we enter the third decade of the Web we are seeing an increasing shift from native desktop applications towards Web-hosted clones that run in browsers. For example, a range of products such as Microsoft Office Live, Google Docs, Zoho, ThinkFree, DabbleDB, Basecamp, and many others now provide Web-based alternatives to the full range of familiar desktop office productivity apps. The same is true for an increasing range of enterprise applications, led by companies such as Salesforce.com, and this process seems to be accelerating. In addition, hosted remote storage for individuals and enterprises of all sizes is now widely available and inexpensive. As these trends continue, what will happen to the desktop and where will it live?" .... Is the desktop of the future going to just be a web-hosted version of the same old-fashioned desktop metaphors we have today? ..... The desktop of the future is going to be a hosted web service ..... The Browser is Going to Swallow Up the Desktop ...... The focus of the desktop will shift from information to attention ...... Users are going to shift from acting as librarians to acting as daytraders. ...... The Webtop will be more social and will leverage and integrate collective intelligence ....... The desktop of the future is going to have powerful semantic search and social search capabilities built-in ....... Interactive shared spaces will replace folders ....... The Portable Desktop ........ The Sma

CIO Magazine has an extensive interview with Craig Mundie, the man responsible for nailing down the next generation of monopolist profits: "You talk about technology waves. What will be the next big wave? What happens in waves is the shift from one generation of computing platform to the next. That platform gets established by a small number of killer apps. We've been through a number of these major platform shifts, from the mainframe to the minicomputer to the personal computer to adding the Internet as an adjunct platform. We're now trending to the next big platform, which I call "the client plus the cloud."

That's one thing, not two things. Today, we've got a broadening out of what people call the client. My 16 years here was in large measure about that. And then we introduced the network. The Internet was a place where you had Web content and Web publishing, but other than being delivered on some of those clients, the two things were somewhat divorced.

The next thing that will emerge is an architecture that allows the application developer to think of the cloud plus the client architecturally as a single thing. In a sense, it is like client/sever computing in the enterprise. It was the homogeneity that existed between some of the facilities at the server and the client end that allowed people to build those applications. We've never had that kind of architectural homogeneity in this cloud-plus-client or Internet-plus-smart-devices world, and I'm predicting that will be the next big thing.

It's the old "offer you can't refuse ploy." If the sale to Microsoft goes through, watch that company screw up Tik-tok.

Virtually all of the big ECM players have joined the OASIS CMIS TC, but how many are there to collaborate and how many to obstruct? See . The Alfresco Labs FOSS CMIS and BPM hub seems to be gaining by leaps and bounds and now offers even more app interop connections including -- vitally -- with Sharepoint. CMIS is a standard we might keep an eye on.

Power for The Public Services... For The Public Media... For Every@ne's Voice.

NEW YORK - The country's five silos of public radio and television are spilling into each other with a joint program that will allow them - and eventually the public itself - to build apps, stations, websites and other media services combining audio, text and video content from every public radio and television outlet in the country. NPR president and CEO Vivian Schiller appeared at Wired's Disruptive by Design conference Monday morning to announce the new Public Media Platform, a partnership between American Public Media, National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting Services (PBS), Public Radio International and the Public Radio Exchange distribution network. The Public Media Platform is "a series of platforms that will allow all of the content from all of those entities - whether news or cultural products - to flow freely among the partners and member stations, and ultimately, also to other publishers, other not-for-profits and software developers who will invent wonderful new products that we can't even imagine," said Schiller.

This strikes me at first blush as a potentially disruptive move by public radio and television stations and networks, somewhat akin to the disruptive free and open source software movement. I.e., because the content is free and will apparently be freely available to the public for recycling, we may see the emergence of a viral free meta-network of the kind that content providers stuck behind paywalls can't imitate. Potentially a significant content commons counter-balancing force to paywall content providers. The devil is in the details and implementation, of course.

Good analysis by Stephen Vaughan-Nichols. He gets it right. Sort of. Stephen believes that Chrome is desinged to kill MSOffice. Maybe, but i think it's way too late for that. IMHO, Chrome is designed to keep Google and the Open Web in the game. A game that Microsoft is likely to run away with. Microsoft has built an easy to use transiton bridge form MSOffice desktop centric "client/server" computing model to a Web centirc but proprietary RiA-WebStack-Cloud model. In short, there is an on going great transtion of traditional client/server apps to an emerging model we might call client/ WebStack-Cloud-RiA /server computing model. As the world shifts from a Web document model to one driven by Web Applications, there is i believe a complimentary shift towards the advantage Micorsoft holds via the desktop "client/server" monopoly. For Microsoft, this is just a transtion. Painful from a monopolist profitability view point - but unavoidably necessary. The transition is no doubt helped by the OOXML <> XAML "Fixed/flow" Silverlight ready conversion component. MS also has a WebStack-Cloud (Mesh) story that has become an unstoppable juggernaut (Exchange/SharePoint/SQL Server as the WebSTack). WebKit based RiA challengers like Adobe Apollo, Google Chrome, and Apple SproutCore-Cocoa have to figure out how to crack into the great transition. MS has succeeded in protecting their MSOffice monopoly until such time as they had all the transtion pieces in place. They have a decided advantage here. It's also painfully obvious that the while the WebKit guys have incredible innovation on their side, they are still years behind the complete desktop to WebStack-RiA-Cloud to device to legacy servers application story Microsoft is now selling into the marketplace. They also are seriously lacking in developer tools. Still, the future of the Open Web hangs in the balance. Rather than trying to kill MSOffice, i would think a better approach would be that of trying to

There are five reasons why Google is doing this, and, if you read the comic book closely - yes, I'm serious - and you know technology you can see the reasons for yourself. These, in turn, lead to what I think is Google's real goal for Chrome.

I'm still keeping the door open on a suspicion that Microsoft may have planned to end the life of MS Office after the new fortress on the server side is ready. The code base is simply too brittle to have a competitive future in the feature wars. I can't get past my belief that if Microsoft saw any future in the traditional client-side office suite, it would have been building a new one a decade ago. Too many serious bugs too deeply buried in spaghetti code to fix; it's far easier to rebuild from the ground up. Word dates to 1984, Excel to 1985, Powerpoint to 1987, All were developed for the Mac, ported years later to Windows. At least Word is still running a deeply flawed 16-bit page layout engine. E.g., page breaks across subdocuments have been broken since Word 1.0. Technology designed to replace yet still largely defined by its predecessor, the IBM Correcting Selectric electro-mechanical typewriter. Mid-80s stand-alone, non-networked computer technology in the World Wide Web era? Where's the future in software architecture developed two decades ago, before the Connected World? I suspect Office's end is near. Microsoft's problem is migrating their locked-in customers to the new fortress on the server side. The bridge is OOXML. In other words, Google doesn't have to kill Office; Microsoft will do that itself. Giving the old cash cow a face lift and fresh coat of lipstick? That's the surest sign that the old cow's owner is keeping a close eye on prices in the commodity hamburger market while squeezing out the last few buckets of milk.