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Litigation 'Software as a Service' (SaaS) Arrives By Gene Albert Should your firm consider using a SaaS litigation support application? Gene Albert discusses the benefits to small and medium-sized firms, and what firms should expect. New approach Offers Ease-of-Use, Low Cost and Less Onerous IT Demands Software as a service, or 'SaaS', refers to web-native software that the service provider both develops and supports. Customers do not buy the software but rather pay to use it, often on a monthly basis.  SaaS applications have become popular in a number of industries because of its ability to provide robust functionality while not requiring from the user an upfront investment for hardware or software, or ongoing support. While the SaaS acronym is new, the idea is not.  Lexis and Westlaw pioneered the online delivery of legal research in the 1980s.  What is new about SaaS is how it's done, with new applications designed from the ground up to work over the internet. Both established and new companies have begun offering litigation SaaS applications and promise law firms the ability to manage their litigation matters anywhere from a web browser. This article will discuss why firms might want to consider using a SaaS litigation support application, benefits of the SaaS approach for small and medium-sized firms, and what a firm should expect from a SaaS provider.

NY-based Kaltura has received a good bit of buzz since I first reported about their presentation at the NY Video Meetup last April. Since then they have gone on to win the people's choice at Techcrunch40 and have launched a useful Facebook application. I had a chance to grab a coffee with co-founder Ron Yekutiel and here are my notes: Ron describes Kaltura as "wiki meets YouTube". He believes there is a movement going on from text publishing to video publishing and that collaboration in the video space is where Kaltura leads the pack. Kaltura is seeking to empower other social networks by their use of the Kaltura application. Ron says that while Kaltura.com is a destination site, the real power is how other sites use the tool within their framework. What I get about Kaltura is that small contributions can equal big productions where everybody has a vested interest in the final product. Ron spoke about four reasons people collaborate on video: For social progression and to see interaction Text is dead (Allen's note: I sure hope not!) The number of contributors help to decrease the barriers to contribution The swarm effect of advertising - he sees this as the new model where instead of a 1-1 advertising or many-many, companies will use collaboration to reach their desired customer The Kaltura team has four co-founders, two are in New York and the other two are in Israel. The team totals 25 people and are in Israel. From what I gather, the leadership of Kaltura might be the most educated group I have come across. Lots of post-graduate degrees from Ivy League schools. We spoke about the Kaltura business model which is largely based on rev share. It's an interesting model because it puts the trust in the sites using the application to report the income back as they use their own advertising not Kaltura's ad platform. For sites that don't have their own advertising platform, Kaltura can provide one with strong advertising players involved. Ron left me with some juicy bits about the future for Kaltura but he asked me not to share them at this time. He said they are coming very soon and as soon as I can share with you, I will.

SoonR is the only service that enables standard mobile phones to use the applications on computers in an optimized way.  Desktop Search, Outlook, Mac Mail, Skype, and the files on desktop computer(s) are made available anywhere you are and even when your computer is turned off*. Any phone with data access becomes a smart phone.

Sharepoint, Among Other Upgrades October 17, 2007 — 08:18 PM PDT — by Kristen Nicole — Share This NewsGator, the RSS company, has announced at the Web 2.0 Conference that NewsGator Social Sites are now available for users to incorporate for business use. Social Sites is an add-on for the NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES), which is a tool that businesses can use as a way to interact, share news, search for items and generally keep up with what’s going on in the company. Included in this launch is the support of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and 3.0. So now you can let your employees use NewsGator Social Sites for communicating in a circular manner around important information. Incorporate RSS feeds, profiles, self-published articles, tags and more into the network to be searched be employees. The syndication of content from SharePoint Server lets users keep up with updates from their desktop, email service or mobile device. Some other enhancements come in the way of actual social networking options. Profiles have been improved so that more relevant information is more readily available, making it easier to find people with the necessary area of expertise, for the necessary information. NewsGator has also recently launched its Facebook application.

Waiting for GPhone to ring? MATHEW INGRAM Globe and Mail Update E-mail Mathew Ingram | Read Bio | Latest Columns September 6, 2007 at 12:01 AM EDT Apple may be the undisputed king of preannouncement hype (with the recent flurry of rumours about new iPod features, some of which were announced yesterday, being just the latest example) but Google has to run a close second. And the current hot spot for die-hard fans of the technology giant is the much-rumoured “Google phone” or GPhone. Whispers about such an animal have been circulating in the geekosphere since last year, but have recently caught fire again, with reports that some Silicon Valley insiders have seen actual prototypes of such a phone, and other reports that Google might be ready to launch a version in India. Om Malik, a former writer for Business 2.0 magazine who runs a blog network called GigaOm, recently spoke to a technology insider who said the tech company is working on a Google Phone that will run a modified version of the Linux operating system and have a special Web browser. According to some analysts, Google has been talking with several major carriers about distributing a low-price (or even free) device, the cost of which would be paid for by advertising. Various reports – including one in The Wall Street Journal last month – have said the phone will be loaded with Google software, including Gmail, Google Talk, an instant messaging and voice-calling service, and a special version of its mapping software that would use the device's built-in GPS. Skeptics (including yours truly) have pooh-poohed the idea that Google might want to get into the phone business, in the sense of designing and/or selling a specific piece of hardware. Why? Because it seems antithetical to what Google has been about – namely, perfecting software for searching, and more recently for search-related ads, e-mail and other online services. The only piece of hardware that Google makes or is involved in making is the Google “appliance” that companies can use as part of their internal computer networks – although it also plays a role in customizing the hundreds of thousands of servers in its giant server “farms.” It wasn't that long ago that Google was rumoured to be building a cheap “Google PC,” one that would be loaded with Google software and sold through retailers such as Wal-Mart. That never came to pass, however, and the company made a point of saying it had no intention of getting into the notoriously cutthroat hardware business. One of the driving forces behind much of the Google Phone speculation appears to be dissatisfaction with existing cellphone companies and carriers. You can almost hear people wishing that a giant company with billions of dollars in cash – not to mention a propensity for offering things for free – would come in and shake up the mobile phone market. The GPhone rumours have been persistent in part because there are so many puzzle pieces that appear to fit, with one of the biggest being a Google employee named Andy Rubin. A co-founder of Danger Inc., the company that developed the Sidekick phone/PDA, Rubin started another company called Android, which was acquired by Google in 2005. Google also bought a Waterloo, Ont.-based mobile software company called Reqwireless. Google recently said that if the U.S. Federal Communications Commission were to change the way it auctions wireless spectrum, the company would be willing to spend almost $5-billion (U.S.). And there have been repeated rumours about Google buying up “dark” or unused fibre capacity across the U.S. The perfect foundation for a new Google Phone service, some say. But does this mean a dedicated piece of hardware known as the Google Phone is definitely coming? Hardly. There's no question that Google has been actively courting phone makers and carriers about bundling its applications on their devices. It may even be working on developing its own mobile phone software, to make those Web applications easier to develop and use. But it's still quite a leap from that to a Google Phone. Of course, when you are churning out billions of dollars in free cash flow every month the way Google is, virtually anything is possible. Mobile phone users who are craving something new – and can't afford an iPhone – will no doubt be keeping their fingers crossed.

Paul, Jake and I were chatting a few weeks ago wondering how we can establish an ongoing dialog with our peers in product strategy and capture the innovative ideas they have for our future products. We thought of several ways to do this: Having conference calls to exchange ideas on a regular basis Inviting our peers to collaborate on a Google doc Build a simple website to track their ideas Obviously, 1 and 2 are bad ideas, so we opted for 3. What we needed was a site where people can submit their ideas, tag them, have them be rated by their peers, and allow comments to be entered. I like to call it “The Wall” — throw your ideas up on the wall and see if they stick… the community will decide. The real name of the site is “IdeaFactory”. A pretty simple site, really. It follows the same principles as most Web 2.0 sites today — folksonomies and feedback systems (ratings/comments) to facilitate community building. So, that night I set out to build it. As you know, I’m a rails fanboy now and so building it with RoR was a no brainer for me. I already knew that there were rails plugins for most of the features we needed (tagging, comments, search, etc.) My job would be to just tie them all together. To start, I gathered together the best plugins I knew about to build this site (I used agilewebdevelopment.com to help me). I ended up with these plugins: acts_as_commentable — for comments integration acts_as_ldap_authenticated — this is a variation on acts_as_authenticated with LDAP authentication support. In the future, I think I’ll migrate the LDAP code in this plugin to the restful_authentication plugin. I needed this plugin to tie into Oracle’s LDAP system so that users can just use their Oracle userid/pwds to get into the site. acts_as_taggable_on_steroids — for tagging support asset_packager — not necessary, but does a nice job of combining and minifying my javascripts and stylesheets minus_r — not necessary, but I hate the way rails treats javascript (they make you code your javascript in ruby… lame). Also, I wanted this since I prefer to use jQuery instead of Prototype. permalink_fu — not necessary, but gives me nice readable URLs acts_as_rateable — enables a five star rating system tiny_mce — enables WYSIWYG text editing which allows people to enter their content with some basic formatting. The beauty of using rails is that over the past few years, it’s become a popular choice for building “2.0″ style apps. And so, lots of the features of a “2.0″ style web application have been turned into rails plugins which makes building stuff with those features dirt simple. It’s also a framework that has a huge (and growing) community of developers who love to share their knowledge and code. When I started building the IdeaFactory, I had no idea that I would have a working version within 24 hours with all the key feature (tagging, ratings, comments, and LDAP auth). I’ve built a few rails apps before this one, but none that were really that interesting. The IdeaFactory is something that was interesting because it was badly needed by our teams — too many ideas weren’t being shared and critiqued by the general Oracle ecosystem. So, we knew that if we built the IdeaFactory, it would get used a fair bit and would help Oracle product strategists be more collaborative. I started coding on a Thursday night and by mid-day Friday morning, I had the general pieces in place so that data can be entered. On Friday afternoon, I requested a new hostname (http://ideas.us.oracle.com — intranet) which came alive by Saturday. I made a few enhancements over Saturday and Sunday and by Monday, the site was live! Since then, the site’s taken off (thanks to the additional boost by Justin). It’s become such a popular site internally, that there’s talk of putting together a public facing IdeaFactory site for Oracle customers — I’m hoping that happens. While many of us in development have been used to the whole process of requirements gathering, writing a BRD (business requirements doc), FDD (functional design doc), and TDD (technical design doc) — which I’m intimately used to doing over the years, it’s refreshing to be able to just roll up my sleeves and start building something and have a working product within hours of starting. I can’t wait for my next project. Stay tuned… you’ll hear about it here.

Legal Careers Lose Their Allure, Drop to Dentistry Status Posted Jan 7, 2008, 05:52 am CST By Debra Cassens Weiss College grads who want wealth and social status are passing up law and medicine for careers in investment banking. A career at a hedge fund or private equity firm can offer financial rewards that outpace earnings at even the biggest law firms. Partners at the nation’s largest 100 firms made an average of $1.2 million in 2006, but many senior investment bankers will take home an average of $2.25 million to $2.75 million in bonuses and salaries, the New York Times reports. But even more important than money are the glamour, control and quick path to financial rewards in investment banking, according to the article. Lawyers no longer enjoy the prestige they once held, and the quest for billable hours has taken away the notion of law as a noble profession. Doctors and lawyers “have slipped a notch in social status, drifting toward the safe-and-staid realm of dentists and accountants,” the story reports. The change is reflected in the number of students applying to law schools. The number of applicants dropped 5.2 percent in 2005 from the year before, and another 6.7 percent in 2006, when 83,500 applied to law schools.