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Jonathan Rochelle and Dave Girouard: Google's long-term vision of computing is based around the notion that the Web and the browser become the primary vehicles for applications, and Google Docs is an important part of realizing that vision. The main improvement was to create a common infrastructure across the Google Docs products, all of which came into Google from separate acquisitions, Rochelle said. This has paved the way for Google to offer users a chance to do character-by-character real-time editing of a document or spreadsheet, almost the same way Google Wave lets collaborators see each other's keystrokes in a Wave. Those changes have also allowed Google to take more control of the way documents are rendered and formatted in Google Docs, instead of passing the buck to the browser to make those decisions. This allows Google to ensure that documents will look the same on the desktop or in the cloud, an important consideration for designing marketing materials or reviewing architectural blueprints, for example.

"Horizon Info Services is committed to offering industry-leading technology services to small businesses at affordable prices." This is an interesting approach. Horizon is a reseller of customized and enhanced Google services. They provide enterprises and SMB's with gMail hosting, on-line backup services, security, and customized Google Apps. They are also ready to dive into Google Wave, as the ultimate interface for aggregating Web based communications, messaging, conversations and collaborative documents.

""…what this means is that the current safety standards as off by a factor of about 7 million.' Pointing out that a recent FCC Chair was a former lobbyist for the telecom industry, "I know how they've attacked various people.  In the U.S. … the funding for the EMF research [by the Environmental Protection Agency] was cut off starting in 1986 … The U.S. Office of Naval Research had been funding a fair amount of research in this area [in the '70s]. They [also] … stopped funding new grants in 1986 …  And then the NIH a few years later followed the same path …" As if all was not reason enough for concern or even downright panic,  the next generation of wireless technology known as 5G (fifth generation), representing the innocuous sounding Internet of Things, promises a quantum leap in power and exceedingly more damaging health impacts with mandatory exposures.      The immense expansion of radiation emissions from the current wireless EMF frequency band and 5G about to be perpetrated on an unsuspecting American public should be criminal.  Developed by the US military as non lethal perimeter and crowd control, the Active Denial System emits a high density, high frequency wireless radiation comparable to 5G and emits radiation in the neighborhood of 90 GHz.    The current Pre 5G, frequency band emissions used in today's commercial wireless range is from 300 Mhz to 3 GHZ as 5G will become the first wireless system to utilize millimeter waves with frequencies ranging from 30 to 300 GHz. One example of the differential is that a current LANS (local area network system) uses 2.4 GHz.  Hidden behind these numbers is an utterly devastating increase in health effects of immeasurable impacts so stunning as to numb the senses. In 2017, the international Environmental Health Trust recommended an EU moratorium "on the roll-out of the fifth generation, 5G, for telecommunication until potential hazards for human health and the environment hav

Über technologist Michael Hickens writes about the recent Cisco announcement that they intend on competing with Google, Zoho and MOSS in the cloud collaboration space. I left a lengthy comment on this page, trying to come to grips with the meaning of this challenge. I titled my comment, "Cisco Office? Maybe they should consider Feng Office-in-the-Cloud". Good luck Conrado. Go get them. Interestingly, Jason Harrop and i met Ms. Alex Hadden-Boyd, director of marketing for the collaboration software group at Cisco. She was kind enough to refer me directly to David Knight, the technology director of Cisco's WebEX Conferencing initiative. Alex is quoted in a CNet article at: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10276549-92.html Cisco is striving to redefine itself as a vendor connecting inner and outer clouds, thus reasserting its relevance in the context of a fluid Web-driven IT world increasingly dominated by the likes of Google, Salesforce, Oracle and IBM. It also hopes to parlay its legacy of infrastructure expertise into a reassuring presence, particularly for veteran IT administrators struggling to balance their in-house infrastructures against the cost-savings and potential efficiencies of cloud computing.

Knock me over with a feather. Now comes news that Cisco wants to challenge Microsoft Office and Google Apps. Paul Smalera of Business Insider questions the wisdom of this initiative, insisting that Cisco must know it can't beat either MSOffice or Google Apps. Maybe Cisco is fishing for help? Where is that wave-maker application Jason and Florian are said to be working on? :) Excerpt: Cisco VP Doug Dennerline told reporters, the company is "thinking about" adding document drafting and sharing to WebEx, which already features instant messaging, online meeting and email services.

Whoops. This is the better article! ZDNet got the dregs. CNET got the real thing: Google Native Client, HTML5, GWT, Wave, Web Worker Threads, webkit/chromium, Chrome, O3D "Google wants its Native Client technology to be a little more native. Google Native Client, still highly experimental, lets browsers run program modules natively on an x86 processor for higher performance than with Web programming technologies such as JavaScript or Flash that involve more software layers to process and execute the code. But to use it, there's a significant barrier: people must install a browser plug-in.

Move over FlipBoard and QWiki and meet Needle.  The emerging market space for automating the process of collecting Web information to analyse, re-purpose and re-publish is getting crowded.   Needle is designed to: acquire data from multiple sources:  A simple tagging process quickly imports structured data from complex websites, XML feeds, and spreadsheets into a unified database of your design.merge, deduplicate and cleanse: Needle uses intelligent semantics to help you find and merge variant forms of the same record.  Your merges, edits and deletions persist even after the original data is refreshed from its source. merge, deduplicate and cleanse: Needle uses intelligent semantics to help you find and merge variant forms of the same record.  Your merges, edits and deletions persist even after the original data is refreshed from its source. build and publish custom data views: Use Needle's visual UI and powerful query language to configure exactly your desired view of the data, whether as a list, table, grid, or map.  Then, with one click, publish the data for others to see, or export a feed of the clean data to your own local database. Flipboard is famous for the slick republishing / packaging process focused on iOS devices.  Allows end users to choose sources. QWiki takes republishing to the extreme, blending voice over (from wikipedia text) with a slide show of multimedia information.  Edn user does not yet have control and selection of information sources with QWiki. The iOS Sports Illustrated app seems to be the starting point for "immersive webzines", with the NY Times close behind.  Very very slick packaging of basic Web information. Flipboard followed the iOS re-publishing wave with an end-user facing immersive webzine packaging design.  And now we have Needle. Still looking for a business document FlipBoard, where a "project" is packaged in a FlipBoard immersive container.  The iPack would be similar to an iPUB book with the added featur

Note: On April 12th, 2011 Needle was acquired by Google.

"Gary Edwards on Mar 15, 8:25 PM said: There are only three apps i load at boot-up: gMail, gReader, and gWave. Ooops! Google Wave was cancelled over a year ago. Owning the end-users attention at boot-up proved to be an essential factor to the Microsoft monopoly. They built an iron fisted empire out of owning the point of boot-up. So it's very strange to see Google give up the very thing other cloud platform contenders would no doubt kill for. Very strange. Even stranger though is the perception that Google + will somehow now move to center stage? The only reason i use Google+ is because it's easy to point to an article and post a comment from Google Reader to my + circles. Other than that i have no use for +. Nicolas Carr posted an interesting comment on Google's cancellation of gReader yesterday. He tried to argue that there is a difference between "tools" and "platforms", and Google was more interested in building a platform than maintaining "tools" like gReader. So, Google+ is now essential to the Google Platform? Unfortunately, the otherwise brilliant and cosmic insightful Mr. Carr, fails to make that case. Microsoft became a platform when they succeeded in positioning their OS as the essential factor bridging an explosively innovative and rapidly commoditiz'ing Windows hardware reference platform, and, he equally rapid and innovative Windows software application platform. Both software and hardware were being written and developed to the Windows OS, with features doubling and costs being halved at a rate that even Moore's Law envied. Microsoft fully cemented the emerging hardware - OS - application platform with a business productivity environment that necessitated the use of the MS Office suite of servers and apps. That lock on business productivity has yet to be broken. And even though the mighty Google Apps has made some progress convincing businesses to rip-out-and-replace their legacy business productivity systems and re write to the Google Cloud P

"Add Hitler to the list of people frustrated by Google's decision to shut down Google Reader. In the latest addition to the Hitler Reacts meme, Hitler fumes over the news that his favorite RSS reader is being killed off. "Why on Earth do they need to destroy all things good?" Hitler says at one point. "How dare they take away Google Reader. I have over 300 feeds in there. Have they any idea how much effort I've put in?" When one of his lieutenants tries to tell him that the product has been shut down so Google can focus on other areas such as Google Glass, Hitler shouts that Glass is the worst product idea since Google Wave, before going back to his rant. "What are my alternatives now, huh?" he shouts. "Getting my news from what's retweeted by Stalin?" Fair warning: there's some NSFW language in the video. "

Control vs. Creativity.  As the ulitmate control freak, Ballmer was guanteed to crush the life out of Microsoft's most creative individuals and teams.  Gates was focused on Windows and MSOffice, and Ballmer on control.  That one-two punch made certain that Microsoft would not be a player in the next great wave of computing; The Cloud.   excerpt: This is yet another example of what I like to call the Wile E. Coyote syndrome. Like the unfortunate character in the old Warner Bros. cartoons, Microsoft now seems to be a company that has long since run off the cliff but, with legs spinning for all they are worth, doesn't know yet that it is ready to drop. Yet drop it most certainly will. Microsoft Win8 Tablet Is NOT a Game Changer Adam Hartung Contributor Snapshot: Steve Ballmer Follow (93) #44 Billionaires IDC Analyst: Microsoft's Surface Sizzle Needs Win8 Steak Daniel Nye Griffiths Contributor To understand how this happens, take a look at the work of Arnold J. Toynbee, a historian who studied the rise and fall of civilizations. He argued that a civilization flourishes when it motivates insiders and attracts outsiders with its creative dynamism and culture. The civilization breaks down when its leadership loses this creative capacity and gives way to, or transforms itself into, a dominant minority. When this happens, the driver of the civilization becomes control, not attraction. And it's precisely this switch from attraction to control that is the source of the breakdown. Interestingly, Toynbee says that the consequences may not be immediately apparent. A civilization can keep up momentum because the controls it puts in place generate some short-term efficiency. But eventually it will run its course and collapse, because no amount of control can replace the loss of collective creativity. Observe this in the corporate world by looking at the example of General Motors. G.M.'s 2009 bankruptcy came at the end of a long decline dating back to the early 197

Comment posted 1 week ago in reply to Zzgomes .....  by Ed Carp.  Finally someone who gets it! OBTW, i replaced Windows 7 with Linux Mint over a year ago and hope to never return.  The thing is though, i am not a member of a Windows productivity workgroup, nor do i need to connect to any Windows databases or servers.  Essentially i am not using any Windows business process or systems.  It's all Internet!!! 100% Web and Cloud Services systems.  And that's why i can dump Windows without a blink! While working for Sursen Corp, it was a very different story.  I had to have Windows XP and Windows 7, plus MSOffice 2003-2007, plus Internet Explorer with access to SharePoint, Skydrive/Live.com.  It's all about the business processes and systems you're part of, or must join.   And that's exactly why the Linux Desktop has failed.  Give Cloud Computing the time needed to re-engineer and re-invent those many Windows business processes, and the Linux Desktop might suceed.  The trick will be in advancing both the Linux Desktop and Application developer layers to target the same Cloud Computing services mobility targets.  ..... Windows will take of itself.   The real fight is in the great transition of business systems and processes moving from the Windows desktp/workgroup productivity model to the Cloud.  Linux Communities must fight to win the great transition. And yes, in the end this all about a massive platform shift.  The fourth wave of computing began with the Internet, and will finally close out the desktop client/server computing model as the Web evolves into the Cloud. excerpt: Most posters here have it completely wrong...the *real* reason Linux doesn't have a decent penetration into the desktop market is quite obvious if you look at the most successful desktop in history - Windows.  All this nonsense about binary driver compatibility, distro fragmentation, CORBA, and all the other red herrings that people are talking about are completely irrelevant

Excellent interview from 2010. Still worth reading. excerpt: "In December 2009 Jobs beckoned Houston (pronounced like the New York City street, not the Texas city) and his partner, Arash Ferdowsi, for a meeting at his Cupertino office. "I mean, Steve friggin' Jobs," remembers Houston, now 28. "How do you even prepare for that?" When Houston whipped out his laptop for a demo, Jobs, in his signature jeans and black turtleneck, coolly waved him away: "I know what you do." What Houston does is Dropbox, the digital storage service that has surged to 50 million users, with another joining every second. Jobs presciently saw this sapling as a strategic asset for Apple. Houston cut Jobs' pitch short: He was determined to build a big company, he said, and wasn't selling, no matter the status of the bidder (Houston considered Jobs his hero) or the prospects of a nine-digit price (he and Ferdowsi drove to the meeting in a Zipcar Prius). Jobs smiled warmly as he told them he was going after their market. "He said we were a feature, not a product," says Houston. Courteously, Jobs spent the next half hour waxing on over tea about his return to Apple, and why not to trust investors, as the duo-or more accurately, Houston, who plays Penn to Ferdowsi's mute Teller-peppered him with questions. When Jobs later followed up with a suggestion to meet at Dropbox's San Francisco office, Houston proposed that they instead meet in Silicon Valley. "Why let the enemy get a taste?" he now shrugs cockily. Instead, Jobs went dark on the subject, resurfacing only this June, at his final keynote speech, where he unveiled iCloud, and specifically knocked Dropbox as a half-attempt to solve the Internet's messiest dilemma: How do you get all your files, from all your devices, into one place? Houston's reaction was less cocky: "Oh, s-t." The next day he shot a missive to his staff: "We have one of the fastest-growing companies in the world," it b

The Future of the Open Web You're right that the browser wars do not matter - except for this point of demarcation; browsers that support HTML+ and browser that support 1998 HTML. extensive comment by ~ge~ Not all Web services and applications support HTML+, the rapidly advancing set of technologies that includes HTML5, CSS3, SVG/Canvas, and JavaScript (including the libraries and JSON). Microsoft has chosen to draw the Open Web line at what amounts to 1998-2001 level of HTML/CSS. Above that line, they provision a rich-client / rich-server Web model bound to the .NET-WPF platform where C#, Silverlight, and XAML are very prominent. Noticeably, Open Web standards are for the most part replaced at this richer MSWeb level by proprietary technologies. Through limited support for HTML/CSS, IE8 itself acts to dumb down the Open Web. The effect of this is that business systems and day-to-day workflow processes bound to the ubiquitous and very "rich" MSOffice Productivity Environment have little choice when it comes to transitioning to the Web but to stay on the Microsoft 2010 treadmill. Sure, at some point legacy business processes and systems will be rewritten to the Web. The question is, will it be the Open Web or the MS-Web? The Open Web standards are the dividing line between owning your information and content, or, having that content bound to a Web platform comprised of proprietary Microsoft services, systems and applications. Web designers and developers are still caught up in the browser wars. They worry incessantly as to how to dumb down Web content and services to meet the limited functionality of IE. This sucks. So everyone continues to watch "the browser wars" stats. What they are really watching for though is that magic moment where "combined" HTML+ browser uptake in marketshare signals that they can start to implement highly graphical and collaboratively interactive HTML+ specific content. Meanwhile, the greater Web is a