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Good review with some important pointers that all software developers should pay attention to.  iPAD apps are essentially WiFi Web Apps at some level.  Once again the NoteCase Pro - Google Docs issue of HTML-CSS Stylesheets vs. in-line custom formatting comes up.  Again. excerpt: InfoWorld.com investigated the available programs and put together a recommended business apps suite that should be the standard install on corporate iPads. I was surprised to find that none of the iPad productivity suites is ideal, though one comes close. (I've added U.S. iTunes links for each app covered.) Related Content View more related content Get Daily News by Email Of course, beyond the productivity apps that nearly everyone uses, iPadders have further needs, so I've also put together a collection of additional business apps that you might make available to employees or point them to for more specialized work.

Good overview of 2010 products and trends. This post is part of our ReadWriteEnterprise channel, which is a resource and guide for IT managers and technologists in the Enterprise. As you're exploring solutions for your enterprise, check out this helpful ReadWriteWeb report provided for FREE courtesy of HP: The Age of Exabytes This year enterprise 2.0 went from being a fringe idea to being mainstream as CIOs started asking "how?" instead of "why?" Big name vendors entered the marketplace with new products and existing vendors released new versions with innovative new features. We chose to break up the enterprise products of the year up into categories: new product, e-mail, mobile, development tool, database, social software suite, social CRM, microblogging, conferencing and CMS. Products were evaluated based on market performance, innovation, utility, impact on the spa

I left a lengthy comment on this very good article. excerpt: According to the latest study from Juniper Research, the market for cloud-based mobile applications will grow 88% from 2009 to 2014. The market was just over $400 million this past year, says Juniper, but by 2014 it will reach $9.5 billion. Driving this growth will be the adoption of the new web standard HTML5, increased mobile broadband coverage and the need for always-on collaborative services for the enterprise. Cloud Apps in your Pocket Mobile cloud computing is a term that refers to an infrastructure where both the data storage and the data processing happen outside of the mobile device from which an application is launched. To the typical consumer, a cloud-based mobile application looks and feels just like any app purchased or downloaded from a mobile application store like iTunes. However, the app is driven from the "cloud," not from the handheld device itself. There are already a few well-known mobile cloud apps out there including Google's Gmail and Google Voice for iPhone. When launched via iPhone homescreen shortcuts, these apps perform just like any other app on the iPhone, but all of their processing power comes from the cloud. In the future, there will be even more applications like these available, but they won't necessarily be mobilized web sites like those in Google's line-up. Cloud-based mobile apps are perfectly capable of being packaged in a way that allows them to be sold alongside traditional mobile apps in mobile application stores, with no one but the developers any wiser. HTML5 Paves the Way for Mobile Web's Future

I posted two lengthy comments here.  Can't see the forest for all the trees is the idiom that comes to mind. excerpt: With Silverlight, Microsoft continues to make it clear that they intend to use this web application framework, which they developed, to power much of what they are doing on the web going forward. Again, the problem here is that not only does Microsoft control this, but it requires a plug-in to use. Sure, they've made the plug-in available to most browsers, including the ones by rivals Google and Apple, but it's still a plug-in. It's something that's going to stop everyone from seeing the same web no matter which browser they use. This has of course long been an issue with Microsoft. Despite a clear shift within the rest of the industry toward web standards, Microsoft long played difficult with its Internet Explorer browser. They could afford to, and maybe you could even argue that it was in their interest to, because they were so dominant. It was only when a standards-based browser, Mozilla's Firefox, started biting off significant chunks of IE's market share that Microsoft shifted their position to play more nicely with standards.

List of 2010 predictions from Mark Anderson.  Interestingly he points out that Microsoft's loss in the mobility market is the leading factor in their loss as a consumer facing provider.  No mention of the Web being split between a Google dominated and consumer facing Open Web, and a Microsoft owned enterprise facing proprietary Web. excerpt: Microsoft started out its life as a consumer/developer-focused company. The company subsequently switched strategies and became a largely enterprise-focused vendor. These days, consumer is king for Microsoft - at least as far as corporate strategy and where its ad dollars go. But what if Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie and other leaders at Microsoft are wrong and integrating the consumer and business worlds doesn't really matter? One very influential market watcher, Mark Anderson, author of the Strategic News Service newsletter, is betting that instead of a melding, there will be an increasing chasm between the consumer and business market.

Matthew Papakipos, the engineering director for the Chrome OS project, and Eitan Bencuya, from Google PR. Over the course of the interview, Papakipos and Bencuya go into considerable detail about topics that range from big-picture perspectives on how Google develops software and where it sees the Web going with HTML5, to the nuts and bolts of what Chrome OS is slated to offer in specific areas. In short, we cover the following ground: ... How and when the Chrome OS project was conceived... The relationship between Chrome OS and Android... How Google is trying to tackle the same "file handler" problem as Windows OLE and the registry, but in the cloud.... Who Google sees as the target audience for Chrome OS, how did they decide which projects and features to pursue... The convergence of the phone and the computer... Nuts and bolts details, like native client execution, security, and UI issues... The significance of Chrome's built-in media player

When it comes to presenting graphically oriented programs through a browser, the usual go-to development platforms have been Adobe Flash and -- to a lesser extent -- Microsoft Silverlight. But other, more open technologies are starting to show promise. The 10 best Chrome extensions for work and play |Watch a slideshow of this review. That's what Google aims to highlight on Chrome Experiments, a Web site that showcases JavaScript programs that deliver a rich user-graphics experience. Of the nearly 80 projects featured on Chrome Experiments, the majority are graphic demos. As impressive as such eye candy is, they're not good examples of how capable JavaScript can be for running graphically-oriented applications that are actually useful. But there are a few notable ones, which we present here. (Despite the site's name, these programs should run on any browser that supports JavaScript.)

Incredible.  Despite the title.  It's the platform stupid! excerpt: Much is being written about Gmail, Google's new free webmail system. There's something deeper to learn about Google from this product than the initial reaction to the product features, however. Ignore for a moment the observations about Google leapfrogging their competitors with more user value and a new feature or two. Or Google diversifying away from search into other applications; they've been doing that for a while. Or the privacy red herring. No, the story is about seemingly incremental features that are actually massively expensive for others to match, and the platform that Google is building which makes it cheaper and easier for them to develop and run web-scale applications than anyone else. I've written before about Google's snippet service, which required that they store the entire web in RAM. All so they could generate a slightly better page excerpt than other search engines. Google has taken the last 10 years of systems software research out of university labs, and built their own proprietary, production quality system. What is this platform that Google is building? It's a distributed computing platform that can manage web-scale datasets on 100,000 node server clusters. It includes a petabyte, distributed, fault tolerant filesystem, distributed RPC code, probably network shared memory and process migration. And a datacenter management system which lets a handful of ops engineers effectively run 100,000 servers. Any of these projects could be the sole focus of a startup.

Excellent article on the surprising decline and increasing irrelevance of Microsoft. excerpt: All of this has diminished the biggest number of all: After reaching a peak market capitalization of $642 billion in September 2000, Microsoft's worth has been sliced in half. These reversals have occurred even as Microsoft has spent astronomic sums on research and development--$8.7 billion in the last year alone. Microsoft has also lost ground in key areas in which the Redmond giant had viable contenders well before the competition. Microsoft saw the potential of television in the mid-1990s with WebTV, years before companies like Apple and Google took up the battle for the living room. In short, changing appetites of the marketplace, technological evolution and questionable decision-making inside Microsoft itself have combined to accomplish what antitrust regulators never did: rolling back the company's dominance and opening the terrain for newer, nimbler entrants.

Good explanation of how Bump and PayPal work together. People have predicted the death of cash and checks for a long time. But there are certain transactions - like paying a friend back for dinner or buying vegetables at the farmers' market - for which they remain essential. ¶PayPal's new iPhone application could finally change that. It promises to let you quickly divide a restaurant bill and send a friend the portion you owe just by bumping your iPhones together. ¶The application is free to download from the App Store. Users log in with their PayPal credentials or with their cellphone number and a numeric PIN, and they can send or request money and manage their account on the phone. ¶To send money, users choose a recipient from their cellphone contacts or bump two phones together. For that, the app uses technology from Bump Technologies, which developed it to swap contact information between two phones. The money is transferred immediately

Add this to the Sports Illustrated "immersive" magzine for the iPAD as clear indication that the entire idea of what a visual document is has changed dramatically.  Radically. excerpt: The coolest media experiences that I've seen on the iPad - Operation Ajax, a graphic novel created specifically for the device. At the time, the idea was still very much in development, but today the Operation Ajax application has gone live in Apple's App Store. The major startups in digital comics, ComiXology and Graphic.ly, have focused their energies on making deals with publishers to transfer existing comics to the iPad or other devices. Operation Ajax, on the other hand, was created with the iPad in mind, avoiding some of the issues that come with transferring from print (the iPad screen is slightly smaller than a standard comic book page, for starters), and also making the supplementary material that can't be delivered in print a natural extension of the experience.

what does Meeker see in her crystal ball this year? Two overwhelming trends that will affect consumers, the hardware/infrastructure industry and the commercial potential of the web: mobile and social networking. Such a conclusion is hardly earth-shattering news to GigaOM readers, for we have been following these trends over the past year or two, but Meeker puts some pretty large numbers next to those trends, and looks at the shifts that will (or are likely to) take place in related industries such as communications hardware. She also compares where the rest of the developed world is in terms of mobile communications and social networking with Japan. Again, not a radically different approach to the one many tech forecasters take, but Meeker has the weight of some considerable research chops on her side. The Morgan Stanley analyst says that the world is currently in the midst of the fifth major technology cycle of the past half a century. The previous four were the mainframe era of the 1950s and 60s, the mini-computer era of the 1970s and the desktop Internet era of the 80s. The current cycle is the era of the mobile Internet, she says - predicting that within the next five years "more users will connect to the Internet over mobile devices than desktop PCs." As she puts it on one of the slides in the report: "Rapid Ramp of Mobile Internet Usage Will be a Boon to Consumers and Some Companies Will Likely Win Big (Potentially Very Big) While Many Will Wonder What Just Happened."

Although there are many open source CMSes available, we're going to focus on those that are based upon PHP. The following CMSes are thus PHP-based, and use a MySQL database. The advantages of using such a CMS include portability, support and a large developer base with frequent updates and improvements. We will discuss the following four CMSes: Drupal - a free open source content management system written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License Joomla - an open source content management system platform for publishing content as a Model-view-controller (MVC) web application framework PHPNuke - a web-based automated news publishing and content management system based on PHP and MySQL Wordpress - an open source CMS, often used as a blog publishing application, and is the most popular blog software in use today

Early in December Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle notified the German regulator that they planned to form CPTN Holdings with a view to purchasing 882 of Novell's patents. But the filing was withdrawn (Rücknahme) on Dec. 30. No reason was given for the withdrawal by German authorities, but it is likely voluntary as authorities would not yet have had time to investigate the proposal. However, in recent weeks the German Federal Cartel Office has received letters and recommendations from various open-source organizations including the U.S.-based Open Source Initiative (OSI) and the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). These open-source advocates are extremely alarmed that patents with claims on some elements of open-source software could fall into the hands of companies that compete with that open-source software. Given Novell's past involvement in free software development, it's seems very likely that at least some of the company's patents would cover free software technologies.

Enterprise cloud storage provider Box.net is launching a new version of its software that includes a front-facing interface built from scratch and additional mobile features, the company announced today. The new Box.net interface is a mash-up of micro-blogging activity streams like FriendFeed and online storage like Dropbox. Box users can drag and drop files from their computer directly onto the site to send files into cloud storage. There are also folders that are synched up directly with the cloud, like Dropbox, that automatically update files as they are changed. Users can preview those files directly within Box.net - and the software supports a lot of file formats. Box developer Kim Lockhart showed off the capabilities by opening up Adobe Illustrator files within the web interface and previewing other files from Photoshop and the like. Whenever any file is viewed, commented on or changed, Box.net users get an update on their activity feed. "This basically kills the software problem," Lockhart said. "You can view files like illustrator files and pretty much anything else as we move forward without ever having to have the software." The idea was to remake the front-facing application from scratch because it was becoming too complicated with too many features. Box.net released a new update just about every week last year and added more and more features, and that was clouding up the service and making it too complicated for some end users, said Box.net CEO Aaron Levie. While Box is mainly focused on the enterprise, Levie said Box had plenty of potential in the consumer space - to compete with cloud storage providers like Dropbox and the like.

Convert Content for Android OS Making your content mobile friendly is harder than it sounds. However, more tools are emerging to help companies create content for multiple platforms, from iPads to smartphones, across a variety of operating systems. Recently, AppsGeyser privately launched a web platform that allows you to convert any web content to an Android App. With AppsGeyser companies can create an Android app three ways: Grabbing any website content block or web widget Copying and pasting HTML code, JavaScript, AJAX or Flash Entering the URL of your website Nifty tool for instantly converting web site widgets into Android Apps.  Looks like a new category of tools to make legacy Web services mobile-ready.  Titanium

excellent news site.  divides cloud-computing news into sections, each with it's own RSS: applicaitons, security, developer, management, networking and infrastructure, storage, and private cloud