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Twitter + Location Based Feeds = TwitterWhere October 25, 2007 — 10:01 PM PDT — by Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins — Share This Amongst the hundreds of mashups and utilities for Twitter, there are very few that I find particularly useful. In fact, most of my interfacing with Twitter either takes place in my feed reader or in a GTalk window. Matt King’s TwitterWhere is a definite exception to the rule, however. TwitterWhere is an elegantly simple tool that allows you to generate an RSS or XML Feed  that will provide you with Tweets around a given geographic area. Not to be confused with TwitterWhere.com (a tool allowing you to easily update your current location), in Matt King’s TwitterWhere, search criteria can be entered by city, state, and postal code, then designate the range in miles you wish to include. Once search criteria is entered, you’ll be given links to feeds in RSS format, or in an XML file in the format of the Twitter public timeline. This can be quite useful for not only finding Twiterers in your general area, but in the event of some major news event, it can be an easy way to get instant feedback from folks based in the location where events are unfolding.

Google Docs Introduces Mobile Version October 17, 2007 — 06:24 AM PDT — by Adam Ostrow — Share This While speculation continues over the “GPhone” and when a device with Google’s rumored mobile operating system will arrive, one thing is clear: Google is making a ton of announcements in the wireless space. The latest is a mobile version of Google Docs that just went live, featuring a display of your documents and spreadsheets optimized for mobile screens. Google Docs Mobile presents a list of your documents, and allows you to open them on your handheld. However, the new Google Presentations are not yet available for mobile viewing. Meanwhile, Spreadsheets are displayed in HTML format or can be downloaded as an Excel file. There are also simple navigation options, such as viewing all of your starred items or your various folders. For the moment, all of this wireless goodness is “read-only” and doesn’t allow you to edit your docs, but it’s another highly visible move for Google as it pieces together its mobile operating system. Other recent announcements from Google in the mobile space include the acquisitions of Jaiku and Zingku, a mobile version of AdSense, and an new release of Gmail Mobile. To access Google Docs Mobile, point your wireless browser to: http://docs.google.com/m

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.

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.

When to Go VoIP? That Is the Question By Edward J. GrubbThe Legal IntelligencerAugust 9, 2007 Chances are you know someone who's using free or consumer-class Voice over Internet Protocol solutions and making long-distance calls for "free." But is this VoIP technology suitable for a law firm like yours? Will it provide the business-class security and reliability you expect in your firm's phone system?

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.