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MathML 3 achieves proposed recommendation status. For those unfamiliar with W3C lingo, this means that it is now a proposed standard. Concurrently, W3C published a proposed recommendation for a A MathML for CSS Profile, http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/PR-mathml-for-css-20100810/

According to a new Forrester report, though Microsoft Office continues to be a mainstay both in the enterprise and at home, developing concerns about productivity as they relate to mobile, cloud, and collaboration may bring a shift in enterprise behaviors.

We can all learn a lot of lessons from the history of DDE/OLE/ OLE3/COM /ActiveX/DCOM /COM+ (you can start reading up on Wikipedia to get some background) and how we went from everyone using best-of-breed standalone apps to one integrated, nearly monolithic Office. It basically all started with copy and paste. People who never spent a lot of time in singletasking, character-mode operating environments like the DOS command line don't recall that simply copying-and-pasting information between apps was difficult at the time. And part of the revelation of Windows for mainstream users (or Mac, for leading-edge tech fans), was being able to easily share data in that way. This was different than what Unix users were used to with the command-line pipe, or from what most applications do with feeds today, in allowing structured information flows between applications. There's a desire to combine data from different sources in an arbitrary way, and to have the user interface display the appropriate tools for whatever context you're in. The dominant model here, probably because of the influence of the early PARC demos, is to have toolbars or UI widgets change depending on what kind of content you're manipulating. Microsoft was really into this in the early 90s with OLE2, where your Word toolbars would morph into Excel toolbars if you double-clicked on an embedded spreadsheet. It was ungainly and ugly and slow, especially if you had less than an exorbitant 8MB of RAM, but the idea was pretty cool. And it still is. People are so focused on data formats and feeds that they're ignoring consensus around UI interoperability. The Atom API and Metaweblog API give me a good-enough interface if I want to treat a discrete chunk of information (like a blog post) as an undifferentiated blob. But all the erstwhile spec work around microformats and structured blogging (I forget which one is for XML and which one's for XHTML) doesn't seem to have addressed user experience or editing behavior

See also Wikipedia on Linked Data: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linked_Data

Excellent product release.  MarkLogic is trying to become the Google Search, Organize and Work for all things MSOffice.  Focus on MSOffice 2007 OOXML documents.

Great stats and charts!  Here comes the Android. excerpt: Google's Android operating system has plenty to celebrate this holiday season -- and now, a new trio of studies suggests the platform is poised for even more success in 2010. There's no question Android's been enjoying plenty of time in the spotlight since the launch of Motorola's Droid smartphone. But with dozens of new Android devices expected to debut in the coming months -- possibly even including the omnipotent "Google Phone" (have you seen the things that phone can do?) -- the biggest burst may still be ahead.

Google has been making a number of acquisitions that are clearly Docs-related. Over the weekend, TechCrunch reported that the search giant is in the final stages of talks to acquire DocVerse, a startup that lets users collaborate around Office documents, for $25 million. The deal would also bring Google some key hires, since the startup's co-founders were managers on SharePoint, Microsoft's popular collaboration service. This follows the November acquisition of AppJet, a company founded by former Googlers that created a collaborative word processor. (It's worth noting that Google Docs itself was the offspring of several acquisitions, including Google's purchase of Writely.) Meanwhile, Google has been talking up the splash it wants Google Docs to make in 2010. Don Dodge, who just made the move from Microsoft to Google, recently told me, "2010 is going to be the year of Gmail and Google Docs and Google Apps." Even more concretely, Enterprise President Dave Girouard said last month that Docs will see 30 to 50 improvements over the next year, at which point big companies will be able to "get rid of Office if they choose to." Presumably features from AppJet and DocVerse will be among those improvements. I'd certainly be thrilled to see the battle between Office Docs become a real competition, rather than upstart Google slowly chipping away at Microsoft's Office behemoth.

Eucalyptus, an open-source platform that implements "infrastructure as a service" (IaaS) style cloud computing, aims to take open source front and center in the cloud-computing craze. The project, founded by academics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, is now a Benchmark-funded company with an ambitious goal: become the universal cloud platform that everyone from Amazon to Microsoft to Red Hat to VMware ties into. [Eucalyptus] is architected to be compatible with such a wide variety of commonly installed data center technologies, [and hence] provides an easy and low-risk way of building private (i.e. on-premise or internal) clouds...Thus data center operators choosing Eucalyptus are assured of compatibility with the emerging application development and operational cloud ecosystem while attaining the security and IT investment amortization levels they desire without the "fear" of being locked into a single public cloud platform.

A new IETF working group has been proposed in the Real-time Applications and Infrastructure Area. The IESG has not made any determination as yet. The following draft charter was submitted, and is provided for informational purposes only. Please send your comments to the IESG mailing list (iesg at ietf.org) by January 20, 2010. ... According to reports from developers of Internet audio applications and operators of Internet audio services, there are no standardized, high-quality audio codecs that meet all of the following three conditions: 1. Are optimized for use in interactive Internet applications. 2. Are published by a recognized standards development organization (SDO) and therefore subject to clear change control. 3. Can be widely implemented and easily distributed among application developers, service operators, and end users. ... The goal of this working group is to develop a single high-quality audio codec that is optimized for use over the Internet and that can be widely implemented and easily distributed among application developers, service operators, and end users. Core technical considerations include, but are not necessarily limited to, the following: 1. Designing for use in interactive applications (examples include, but are not limited to, point-to-point voice calls, multi-party voice conferencing, telepresence, teleoperation, in-game voice chat, and live music performance) 2. Addressing the real transport conditions of the Internet as identified and prioritized by the working group 3. Ensuring interoperability with the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP), including secure transport via SRTP 4. Ensuring interoperability with Internet signaling technologies such as Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Session Description Protocol (SDP), and Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP); however, the result should not depend on the details of any particular signaling technology.

What a dumb ass statement: "That's certainly one reason Microsoft still holds a giant lead in market share." The SFGate article compares Google Apps lack of service to Microsoft's Productivity monopoly, suggesting that Microsoft provides better service?  That's idocy.  Microsoft's service is non existent.  Third party MSDN developers and service businesses provide near 100% of MS Productivity support.  And always have.   Where Microsoft does provide outstanding support is to their MSDN network of developers and service providers.   Google will have to match that support if Google Apps is to make a credible run at Microsoft.  But there is no doubt that the monopolist iron grip on the desktop productivity platform is an almost impossible barrier for Google to climb over.  Service excellence or not.

I wouldn't read too much into the drop in ISP stock prices. NYSE stocks plummeted over-all today, with investors reacting to bad economic news from Greece. The article can be a bit confusing in regard to the FCC move following its court loss to Comcast. That court case did not involve the FCC's telephony regulatory powers. The FCC is now rebuilding its prior position on a new legal foundation, a separate title of the enabling legislation that deals with telephone regulation rather than broadband regulation. 

UBS analysts believe that the total market for AWS-type services will be between $5-to-$6 billion in 2010 and will eventually grow to $15-to-$20 billion in 2014. How they arrive at these numbers: * IDC says the total global cloud market in 2010 will be $22 billion and $55 billion in 2014. * IDC says the total servers and storage account for $5 billion-to-$6 billion in 2010 and $15-to-$20 billion in 2015.

For those that needed just a little more proof, Gartner (news, site) has confirmed cloud computing is hot. In fact, cloud technology is so hot that it topped Gartner's 2011 CIO Agenda. Even if you managed to resist the siren of prime time TV beckoning, "To the cloud!", it's unlikely you'll want to ignore the voices of over 2,000 CIOs . The Cloud Gartner released its survey of 2,014 CIOs representing more than US$ 160 billion in spending across 50 countries and 38 industries. Cloud computing, virtualization and mobile led the list of technical priorities.