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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.

Bar Association Enters the 21st Century Lawyers have been using the Internet for a decade, and even the most unsophisticated consumers have had Internet access at home for at least five years. In this context, a directory that would enable consumers to find lawyers online should have seemed like a logical project for bar associations -- which purport to serve the public by helping increase access to law. The bars did little to provide lawyers with ways to list themselves online and, consequently, a few months ago, one company -- Avvo -- stepped in to fill this void  and, in doing so, attracted a controversial response.

Autonomy Buys Zantaz By Phineas LambertThe DealJuly 19, 2007 Enterprise infrastructure software maker Autonomy Corp. PLC on Tuesday, July 3, agreed to buy U.S.-based archiving company Zantaz Inc. for $375 million to exploit the growing electronic discovery market. Pleasanton, Calif.-based Zantaz provides content archiving, electronic discovery products and software to enable organizations to retain and retrieve unstructured digital information, while Autonomy sells the platform for accessing such information. Zantaz generated earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of $5.2 million on revenue of $100 million for the year ended Dec. 31. In the 11 years since it was founded, its VC backers have included General Atlantic Partners LLC, Athena Technology Ventures, Red Rock Ventures, ComVentures, Pyramid Technology Ventures, Geneva Venture Partners and Novus Ventures. The purchase will be Autonomy's largest since it bought data retrieval software maker Verity Inc. for $507 million in cash at the end of 2005. "We have been greatly impressed by Zantaz's products and will be continuing to develop and support the whole range," said Autonomy CEO Michael Lynch in a statement. "Our combined solution will be unique in offering our existing 17,000 customers end-to-end information rich risk-management solutions." Cambridge, U.K.-based Autonomy said the acquisition will be partly funded through the placing of 12.7 million shares and a term loan. On completion, Autonomy said it expects to have about $75 million in cash on its balance sheet. Shares in Autonomy were up almost 9 percent, or 64.5 pence, to 792.5 pence in London, giving the company a market cap of £1.67 billion ($3.36 billion). The announcement coincided with news that Autonomy expects record second-quarter 2007 results, with pretax profit and revenue ahead of the top end of analysts' forecasts. Derek Brown, an analyst at London-based Seymour Pierce Ltd., noted that the market for electronic discovery has been fast-growing since the revised Federal Rules of Civil Procedure require businesses to make readily accessible all relevant information from unstructured data like e-mails. "The deal provides a unique offering in the market: a hosted service for archiving combined with the applications for customers to choose which route to go by," Brown said. "There's a good cross-selling opportunity here." Autonomy expects the acquisition to be earnings accretive in the first six months and generate costs synergies of about $25 million per annum. Tax loss carry-forwards will be assumed with a net present value of about $45 million, it added. Steve King, the target's CEO, will keep his position as chief executive of the Zantaz division of Autonomy. Deutsche Bank AG acted as financial adviser to Autonomy. The deal, subject to regulatory approvals, is expected to be completed by August. Zantaz has agreed to pay a $10 million breakup fee to Autonomy, should it terminate the agreement.

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.