Open Web

I'm not convinced that iCloud will eliminate Windows, MAC and Linux desktops.  I've been using DropBox, SyncDocs, Live.com while testing a number of backup-store-synch-share file services. IMHO, it's all about the apps that act on your data.  And these can come from the desktop, the Browser, or the device.  The best app platform for Cloud hosted data seems to be moving towards HTML5-JS.  Not Win32, .NET, C#, Java or Cocoa (iOS).  And Google clearly has he best platform of integrated services and API's.  They are best positioned to win the Cloud Wars if HTM5-JS and Native Client can close the deal on Cloud apps.  IMHO. excerpt: Apple's announcements yesterday about OS X 10.7 pricing (cheap), upgrading (easy), iOS 5, and iCloud storage, syncing, and media service can all be viewed as increasing ease of use, but from the perspective of Apple CEO Steve Jobs they perform an even more vital function - killing Microsoft. Here is the money line from Jobs yesterday: "We're going to demote the PC and the Mac to just be a device - just like an iPad, an iPhone or an iPod Touch. We're going to move the hub of your digital life to the cloud." Just like they used to say at Sun Microsystems, the network is the computer. Or we could go even further and say our data is the computer. This redefines digital incumbency. The incumbent platform today is Windows because it is in Windows machines that nearly all of our data and our ability to use that data have been trapped. But the Apple announcement changes all that. Suddenly the competition isn't about platforms at all, but about data, with that data being crunched on a variety of platforms through the use of cheap downloaded apps.

This is the Dec 2010 interview that totally changed my view of the future of Documents.  Separating content and layout, and then reconstituting is the essence of preparing a publication.  Are documents Web pages?  Are Web sights magazines?   Visually-immersive apps like TreeSaver and Flipboard change everything, as this video demonstrates.  TreeSaver is OpenWeb HTML+.  FlipBoard is iOS platform specific.  Filipe argues why Open Web will win.  Great interview.  Life changing stuff. excerpt: The problem with Flipboard is that it's an app, not the Web, and I keep hoping someone will show me a really well-designed Web app that shows me that the Web can still win. Yesterday Treesaver's Filipe Fortes took me up on my "can the Web be saved" challenge and visited my house to show me what he's been working on for publishers. An open-source JavaScript/HTML5/CSS library of design templates that will help developers at content companies compete with the design aesthetic that Flipboard showed us.

Roger Black is a publication designer, and Filipe Fortes was the project manager for Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation - Silverlight project.  Today he specializes in dynamic layout algorithms written in Open Web JavaScript.  Roger is a reknown publication designer, and describes here the genesis behind TreeSaver.  Fascinating story certain to become a key explanation of how digital media ran away with the print publishing industry.   I'm wondering what kind of authoring tools will evolve that can publish directly into the TS JavaScript templates?   My first inclination would be to adapt OOo Impress.  It has an outline view, a notes editing capability, and provides a decent visual canvas.  The problem is that it's locked into "slides".  Can Impress be unlocked and flowing?  That might work. excerpt:  when Microsoft put together a dynamic page layout for The New York Times Reader, did they know that it was the future? It certainly wasn't the immediate present, since they couldn't pry the WPF visual layer off of Windows, leaving it a single-OS solution. (The Times' Reader later was taken up by Adobe, which at least got it to work on both Mac and PC.) Filipe Fortes, PM on the MS news client project, knew. I'd met him when the group invited me out to Redmond to help design the first templates for the Times. Later I saw him at the 2007 Mix conference in Vegas, and I asked him how to make the dynamic page size idea work multi-platform. He said, "We could do it in HTML."

Wow!  This reads like a premature press release, but if true it's breakthru technology.  I wonder though why Ericom is targeting education?  Seems this innovation would be of immediate importance to enterprise and SMB businesses struggling with the great transition from desktop/workgroup productivity systems to Web Productivity Platforms. excerpt: Ericom has released AccessNow, a pure HTML5 remote desktop (RDP) client that runs within a Web browser without the need to install anything on the client device. AccessNow provides accelerated remote access to applications and desktops running on Windows Terminal Services, remote desktop services (RDS), and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), including applications, remote desktops, VMware View desktops, virtual desktops running on Microsoft Hyper-V, and other hypervisors. AccessNow works on any device with an HTML5-capable browser, such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, and others, without the use of browser plugins, Java, Flash, ActiveX, Silverlight, or other underlying technology. Internet Explorer is also supported, although it does require the Chrome Frame plugin. AccessNow uses only the standard Web technologies: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This approach helps IT administrators maintain centralized control of school resources. It also enables students and staff to use any Internet-enabled device, including smartphones, tablets, and Chromebooks, to do their work anywhere and anytime.

excerpt: In China, the red-hot tech scene seems dominated by a small group of entrepreneurs who paid their dues in Silicon Valley before returning home to create successful Internet and software startups. Aside from finding fame and fortune, these "returnees" are also laying the foundation for a startup culture that will allow grassroots entrepreneurs to flourish as well. Returnees - Chinese nationals who studied or worked the U.S. - head up just 3 percent of all tech companies in China, yet they represent nearly 70 percent of all startups that go public in the U.S. market (still the largest measure of success in the industry), according to an internal study by Palo Alto, Calif.-based venture capital firm GSR Ventures, which deals exclusively in China. The firm also found startups created by returnees were much likelier to become financially successful and hire more employees than startups founded by Chinese entrepreneurs who never worked in the U.S. Part of that may be cultural: a culture Jack Jia, a partner at GSR sees changing, albeit slowly. he still sees a "drastic" disparity between startups founded by home-grown entrepreneurs and their returnee counterparts during pitching sessions and business plan competitions all across China. Thus, he rarely funds companies headed up by Chinese engineers without managerial-level experience at tech companies in the U.S., even though he would like to encourage the growth of Chinese entrepreneurs who have stayed at home. "Most have no clue what they are doing. The basic expertise, the passion and experience is often lacking," he said. "And it's not that they don't have the same talent or ability, it's just they haven't been exposed to the same things as their American counterparts."

Google "Innovation Nation" Conference in Washington, DC had an interesting conversation thread; that the move to Cloud Computing embraces a move for individual productivity to group productivity.  Not sure i agree with that.  The Windows Desktop-WorkGroup Productivity environment has dominated business since 1992.  Maybe Google might instead focus on the limited access of desktop workgroups and the fact that productivity was horribly crippled by the the PC's lack of communication.  The Web/Cloud magically combines and integrates communication with content and computation.  This is what makes cloud collaboration a genuine leap in productivity - no matter what the discipline.  Here's a question for Google: What's the productivity difference between desktop collaboration and cloud-collaboration? excerpt:  The meeting is the staple of corporate life. The whole day revolves around when a meeting will be, who will be there and what needs to be discussed. Yet, is this rote practice may have become counter-productive in today's world of the always on, always connected workplace. Google's enterprise vision is to leverage mobility and the cloud to change the fundamental way people work. Workforce productivity used to be about how you can optimize individual output. Take all those individuals, put their output together and have a meeting to sort it all out. Google thinks that by putting all that functionality into a cloud environment, workers can use whatever device they want and always be working as a group towards on the mission. A faster, more secure, more cost efficient workplace will be the result. "The main message is that to be an effective [enterprise], we need to change from individual productivity to group productivity,"

Jorno is the folding Bluetooth keyboard that fits in your pocket and allows you to type with ease anytime, anywhere. Write email in a cafe. Take notes in a meeting. Blog wherever you are.

A Complete Document Management System packaged as a server appliance.  Still needs wiki-WORD sync-share-collaborate.  Still needs portable "native client" docx viewer/editor with fixed/flow/flock options. Good solution for SMB:  instead of trusting business documents to a Cloud provider, they can purchase the Treeno DMS-Cloud appliance and do it themselves. Treeno Document Vault 2.0 - document management appliance. The new Treeno Document Vault is designed specifically for the small to medium sized business. It is a completely self-contained plug-and-play document management server appliance. Treeno's EDM solutions include document, imaging, email and document workflow management. Treeno Software's mission is to provide their customers with operational workflow efficiencies and measureable return on investment (ROI) through the fast installation and implementation of their fully secure, highly reliable, and easy-to-use, web-based Enterprise Document Management (EDM) Solution. For more information on Treeno Software, please visit www.treenosoftware.com

Wow!  excellent advice, top to bottom.  Very well thought out flow of wisdom. excerpt: The important work that you build your reputation on - you can't just Google it. You don't cut and paste it from Wikipedia. You roll up your sleeves, and bring all your creativity and meaningful skills to bear on the problem of building something.   This is what the world requires - this is what the world rewards. Not just calling yourself creative, but understanding how to exercise your creative powers to some end, to bring your vision and skills together in a meaningful way. This is a powerful thing to be able to do. It gives you tremendous value in a society where attention is currency - being able to capture people's imaginations is the scarcest kind of power in a fractured culture. Creating work that transports and transcends is one of the few ways to create sustainable value in a disposable society. What you do, if you do it well, is never going to be a commodity. Vision, magic, delight. Heart-rocking spectacle. Pulse-pounding action. These things don't get outsourced to some cubicle drone in the developing world.   You are an influential group of people, and today is an important moment, as you set forth to become the chief stewards of your gifts. Because, this is what it means to be a creative professional: figuring out how to be the best steward of your gifts, so that your power to create grows and deepens meaningfully over time. So that your edges stay sharp, and your light stays bright. The life you've chosen is not one that simply requires clocking in and clocking out. You've got to bring your soul to it every day. You've got to be on your game.   That takes discipline. And it takes awareness - of how you're spending your time, and of how what you're doing affects your capability and your capacity. You are going to have to ask yourself, at every turn: is this project making me smarter, or making me stupider. Is this job stoking my fire,

Incredible Graphic charting the survey responses: excerpt:  BitNami, Cloud.com and Zenoss have released the results of its 2011 Cloud Computing Outlook survey. You can request a copy of the report here. Only 20% respondents have no plans to develop a cloud computing strategy, but there was a clear preference for using dedicated hardware instead of public cloud infrastructure. Virtualization is very popular, and the biggest benefit respondents perceive in cloud computing was hardware savings.

Open Source framework for building visually-immersive mobile ready magazines in HTML5-CSS3-JavaScript. excerpt:  Pugpig is an open source framework that enables you to publish HTML5 content in the form of a magazine, book or newspaper to iPhone and iPad devices. It's slick and feels like you are using a native app (we tested the it on the iPad) Pugpig is an HTML reader for iOS. It's basically a hybrid - part native application, part web app, designed to prove that you can have an HTML-based app that feels like it's native. Your app sits on top of the Pugpig framework. It can be customized and extended. For example, you can link to your own data source, change the navigation and look and feel. It can also be multi-lingual - for example, the sample app I tested leverages the AJAX API for the Microsoft Translator. Additional Pugpig benefits are its low memory footprint and ability to store a lot magazine/newspaper editions within the device, for easy offline viewing. You can offer your app in either the App Store or the new iOS 5 Newsstand (integration with the framework is in progress now).

Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman has a great post where he lists the tools he used to get his company off the ground. We're using it with our own amendments and suggestions to give you the best tools to get your startup off the ground.  Business Insider has a slide show for the 11 tools.  Good stuff!

The Register has a very well written update to the new "concurrency-parallelism" language called Google GO.  The article is five pages long and explains how GO is being used today to do far more than make efficient use of distributed processing farm comprised of the tens of thousands of Google Servers, systems and services.

Wow, watch the video!  The Web rules because it is the first universally available platform to combine communications with computing.  Finally though we are seeing devices designed to truly take advantage of the Web's unique communications and collaborative computing capabilities.  An iPAD with WebEX demonstrates the future.  I hope Google is paying attention.  Every business needs this.

Swiffy converts Flash SWF files to HTML5, allowing you to reuse Flash content on devices without a Flash player (such as iPhones and iPads). Swiffy currently supports a subset of SWF 8 and ActionScript 2.0, and the output works in all Webkit browsers such as Chrome and Mobile Safari. If possible, exporting your Flash animation as a SWF 5 file might give better results. Upload a SWF file

Clash of the Productivity Clouds: Before we attempt to answer those questions, one thing must be stated flatly: Office 365 and Google Apps are vastly different products. Office 365 is meant to be used with a locally installed version of Office (preferably Office 2010), whereas Google Apps lives 100 percent in the browser. To use a hackneyed metaphor, we're talking apples and oranges. With so many feature variables between the two products, blanket pronouncements don't make a lot of sense. Nonetheless, with the production release of Office 365, the cloud era of desktop productivity software officially kicks into high gear. Office 365 works with Microsoft's Web App versions of desktop Office applications -- Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote -- so theoretically, you can use it without a locally installed version of Office at all. But most people won't. The real Office 365 ploy is this: Sick of maintaining Exchange and SharePoint servers? No problem. Pay Microsoft and it will run those servers for you -- and throw in the fancy new Lync communications server. Office 365 represents the first time Microsoft has bundled desktop software (Office 2010) with an online service into a single subscription-based offering. But if you have another source of licenses for Office (2010, 2007, or otherwise), or if you want to run just the Office Web Apps (not likely), you can get an Office 365 license without paying for Office.

Pokki Web-to-Native App Framework.....  excerpt: So what exactly is Pokki? It's a framework built on Chromium that allows developers to build basic applications using standard web technologies, but with a few key additions. First, these applications support nice notification tags in the menu bar (similar to iOS's badge system). They're also handy by design - click one, and it will pop up in a small window that you can use to access your Facebook wall, Gmail inbox, or whatever other application you've installed. Click outside of the Pokki, and it disappears. It's very lightweight. Pokki is initially offering a set of eight applications to users, including apps for Gmail, Facebook, Groupon, eBay, the WSJ, Living Social, and Twitter. That's a solid start, but today's launch is primarily about introducing developers to the Pokki SDK, which isavailable beginning today, and will let developers turn whatever website they like (provided it has an API) into a Pokki. Note that most of the Pokkis launching today were built in-house by SweetLabs. To use Pokki, users have to install the basic framework first, but this will come bundled with all Pokki apps - the company expects users will download a Pokki from one of their favorite sites, and then continue to add more using the integrated Pokki app browser. The apps are launching with support for Windows today, with Mac and Linux support coming down the line.

Google now supports markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page. An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author's bio, photo, articles and other links. If you run a website with authored content, you'll want to learn about authorship markup in our Help Center. The markup uses existing standards such as HTML5 (rel="author") and XFN (rel="me") to enable search engines and other web services to identify works by the same author across the web. If you're already doing structured data markup using microdata from schema.org, we'll interpret that authorship information as well

Good intro to LeanLaunchLab.com.  Great idea for startups! excerpt: Entrepreneur Steve Blank has spent a lot of time thinking (and writing) about how ineffective old-fashioned board meetings are when it comes to building and scaling startups.