Open Web

After reading this article i gave engag.io a try.  It's very simple to sign up different networks like Facebook, Disquis, Tweeter, G+, Tumblr, LinkedIN and FourSquare.  But there doesn't seem to be a way to add my bookmarking network, Diigo?  Still, Engagio looks like a very useful service.  No idea how they plan on making money :) excerpt: The killer app for the social Web is the one that will filter the signal from the noise. In the Facebook age, even casual Web users hold tons of conversations at once. Engagio, the conversation discovery company, pulls them all into one place. It also leads you into new ones. And with a new dashboard view released today, it lets you click one button to figure out what's actually going on in all these conversations. Engagio's dashboard breaks out articles, sites and other links from all your social networks into separate panels, and lets you reply, share and like straight from there. But the best part of this section is the "context" button.

Nice infographic!  Shows that great transition from Windows desktop client/server to Cloud Computing is well underway.  I've tried RingCentral, and it's very good.  But i much prefer Google Voice - especially since i have an HTC Android.  RingCentral only offers one advantage over gVoice; they have integrated fax.  Everything else about RingCentral seemed like a throwback to DOS applications.   gVoice is slowly evolving.  Seems like it's taking forever to complete the integration with gMail, gSearch, and gDocs.  But i can see the incredible potential of Cloud integrated communications, content and collaborative computing.  gVoice has a potential like no one else. excerpt: The results are in from our annual smartphone survey! We polled 300 RingCentral SMB customers about their mobile device adoption and cloud use. The key takeaway: 57% of business owners said the majority of their business-critical applications currently run in the cloud.

Fascinating conversation between Douglas Crockford and Jeremy Geelan. The issue is that XSS - the Cross Site Scripting capabilities of HTML. and "the painful gap" in the HTML5 specification of the itnerface between JavaScript and the browser. I had to use the Evernote Clearly Chrome extension to read this page. Microsoft is running a huge JavaScript advertisement/pointer that totally blocks the page with no way of closing or escaping. Incredible. Clearly was able to knock it out though. Nicely done! The HTML5-XSS problem is very important, especially if your someone like me that sees the HTML+ format (HTML5-CSS3-JSON-JavaScript-SVG/Canvas) as the undisputed Cloud Productivity Platform "compound document" model. The XSS discussion goes right to the heart of matter of creating an HTML compound document in much the same way that a MSOffice Productivity Compound Document worked. The XSS mimics the functionality of of embedded compound document components such as OLE, DDE, ODBC and Scripting. Crack open any client/server business document and it will be found to be loaded with these embeded components. It seems to me that any one of the Cloud Productivity Platform contenders could solve the HTML-XSS problem. I'm thinking Google Apps, Zoho, SalesForce.com, RackSpace and Amazon - with gApps and Zoho clearly leading the charge. Also let me add that RSS and XMP (Jabber), while not normally mentioned with JSON, ought to be considered. Twitter uses RSS to transport and connect data. Jabber is of course a long time favorite of mine. excerpt: The fundamental mistake in HTML5 was one of prioritization. It should have tackled the browser's most important problem first. Once the platform was secured, then shiny new features could be carefully added. There is much that is attractive about HTML5. But ultimately the thing that made the browser into a credible application delivery system was JavaScript, the ultimate workaround tool. There is a painful gap

Put Electronic Imp at the top of the "Technologies to watch" list.  Good stuff and great implementation - platform plan.   excerpt "We've put it in a user-installable module. The user buys the card and just plugs it into any device that has a slot," Fiennes explained." All a developer needs to do is add a socket and a 3-pin Atmel ID chip to their product. That's 75 cents: 30 cents for the ID chip and 45 cents for the socket." This assumes the availability of 3.3 V. "But given that most things you want to control from the Internet are electrical, we think that's reasonable," he said. If not, developers can include a battery. When the $25 card is installed in a slot and powered up, it will find the ID number and automatically transmit the information to Electric Imp's servers. Fiennes and his colleagues have written a virtual machine that runs under a proprietary embedded operating system on the node and looks for updates of itself on the Internet. SSL encryption is used for data security when transmitted over the link. ........

Very interesting article from WSJ on the eve of the FaceBook IPO.  Karlgaard claims that in Silicon Valley, social networking is last years story.  The innovators have moved on to really important stuff, "big stuff", like transportation, energy, electricity, food production, water delivery, health care and education. Killer quote: In Silicon Valley, investing in social-media companies is already passé. Last year, as private investors were bidding up Facebook's valuation to $100 billion, the veteran Silicon Valley investor Roger McNamee said "the next 500 social-media companies will lose money." He's broadly right. The time to make big returns in Facebook and in social media has passed.......... Karlsgard argues that the future belongs to the algorythm engineers, and the magic they make.  He sights the incredibly rapid development of the Google Car, concluding that "This rate of progress is normal in the algorithmic world, but it is new in the physical world."  Silicon Valley is where the great algorithms engineers put their genius to the test.  It's still where money meets magic, and algorithms get to whip saw reality. first up: Manufacturing and Energy. excerpts: Social media is already passé in Silicon Valley. America's innovation engine is now focused on transportation, energy and manufacturing. In March 1986, Microsoft ended its first day as a public company with a market capitalization of $780 million. Its value grew more than 700 times that over the next 13 years and made Bill Gates, in 1999, the richest man ever with a net worth of $101 billion. When Facebook goes public this Friday its market cap could easily hit $100 billion, bringing founder Mark Zuckerberg's net worth to more than $18 billion. That's about 50 times what Mr. Gates was worth after Microsoft's IPO. Facebook's big payday should be cause for celebration in a liberal democracy. Instead it has provoked two kinds of anxiety. Both imply America's best days are over.

Quick overview of HTML5 document structures and how to implement them.

Nice article from Scott M. Fulton describing Microsoft's iron fisted lock on government desktop productivity systems and the great transition to a Cloud Productivity Platform.  Keep in mind that in 2005, Massachusetts tried to do the same thing with their SOA effort.  Then Governor Romney put over $1 M into a beta test that produced the now infamous 300 page report written by Sam Hiser.  The details of this test resulted in the even more infamous da Vinci ODF plug-in for Microsoft Office desktops.   The lessons of Massachusetts are simple enough; it's not the formats or office suite applications.  It's the business process!  Conversion of documents not only breaks the document.  It also breaks the embedded "business process". The mystery here is that Microsoft owns the client side of client/server computing.  Compound documents, loaded with intertwined OLE, ODBC, ActiveX, and other embedded protocols and interface dependencies connecting data sources with work flow, are the fuel of these client/server business productivity systems.  Break a compound document and you break the business process.   Even though Massachusetts workers were wonderfully enthusiastic and supportive of an SOA based infrastructure that would include Linux servers and desktops as well as OSS productivity applications, at the end of the day it's all about getting the work done.  Breaking the business process turned out to be a show stopper. Cloud Computing changes all that.  The reason is that the Cloud is rapidly replacing client/server as the target architecture for new productivity developments; including data centers and transaction processing systems.  There are many reasons for the great transition, but IMHO the most important is that the Web combines communications with content, data, and collaborative computing.   Anyone who ever worked with the Microsoft desktop productivity environment knows that the desktop sucks as a communication device.  There was

Is Intel right?  Is there a "compatibility-interoperability" problem between Windows RT Office (ARM) and legacy (x86) Windows MS Office productivity environments?  It seems to me that the entire reason iPAD, Android and other ARM based tablet systems want MSOffice and MSOffice Visual Document Viewers is exactly because they want and expect a high level of compat-interop with legacy Windows productivity workgroups and client/server systems. What's the truth?  And is there anything x86 providers like Intel and AMD can do about compat-interop and the unstoppable cloud-mobility revolution? excerpt: The Asus tablet has a quad-core Tegra 3 processor from Nvidia. Windows RT comes preloaded with Office 15, a group of widely used productivity applications. Microsoft has said it had to re-engineer Windows RT to deal with expectations for ARM based devices, which include all-day connectivity and low power consumption. The tablet also has an 8-megapixel camera at the rear with LED flash, and a 2-megapixel camera at the front. It has 2GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.0. Intel has already started the war of words against ARM around Windows 8, with Intel's CEO Paul Otellini saying that ARM devices will be incompatible with existing Windows applications and drivers. But analysts have said that Windows RT devices will likely be attractive to users who have few ties with legacy Windows PCs. Low prices could also attract users to Windows on ARM devices.

It's game on between Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure.  Interesting price configurations indicate that Cloud Computing is now a commodity.  One point in the article worth noting is that Cloud applications and services begin as "Cloud" apps - not desktop or client/server.  Bad news for Microsoft..... Excerpt: Microsoft, with its flagship operating system and rich line of related tools and applications, is watching the Windows developer community migrate to the cloud, but often not to its Azure cloud. AWS and Rackspace have offered cheaper raw online computing power. VMware-backed Cloud Foundry offers a development platform to build apps that can deploy on a number of vendors' clouds, and VMware recently made Cloud Foundry more Windows-friendly. Hewlett-Packard, which is just entering the cloud infrastructure market, is emphasizing its own development platform. To keep cloud app developers engaged, Microsoft must put the right resources on Azure's platform-as-a-service--developer tools, database services, and messaging services--but also make it affordable. Today's most creative new software projects often begin in a cloud, and a big reason is to keep startup costs low. Cloud computing is critical to the future of the Windows franchise.

The free CloudON app for iPAD provides a very nice ribbon interface for viewing and editing MSOffice XML documents.  Supports important workgroup features like "change tracking", show or hide markup, make and view comments, restrict editing, and compare and combine versions.  Very cool. Lacks support for custom add-ons, templates, auto-correct settings, and other advanced features may limit the program's usefulness.  Time to do some testing.  Hope Florian catches this post :) excerpt: Support for Office XML file types, and a ribbon to boot ...... Speculation continues as to whether -- most say when -- Microsoft will release a version of Office for the iPad. (CNET blogger Zack Whittaker cites sources predicting a November arrival.) It's not like you have to wait months to create and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files on your iPad. Last June I described how to use Google Docs and Google Cloud Connect to edit Word and Excel files on an iPad for free. The end of that story noted the likely arrival of iPad apps supporting Office file formats. One of the most popular of these is the $15 Quickoffice, a program that was recently acquired by Google. But before you shell out for an Office alternative, check out the free CloudOn app, which now connects to Google Drive and Box accounts as well as Dropbox accounts. Other new features in the latest release let you send files as e-mail attachments and open PDFs. (See Lance Whitney's post on the Internet & Media blog for more on the program's PDF features.) CloudOn's ribbon is a big departure from the Quickoffice interface, which look nothing like Office. (Of course, many people will prefer the clean, clutter-free look of Quickoffice.) None of the Office extras, but all the essentials: In a group setting CloudOn's lack of support for custom add-ons, templates, auto-correct settings, and other advanced features may limit the program's usefulness. Still, the word processor lets you track and accept changes, show or

Nice OpenMobster graphic!  Good explanation of the Android notification advantage over iOS and Windows 7 too.  Note the exception that iOS-5 finally introduces support for JSON. excerpt: Why Android Rocks the Cloud Most open source mobile-cloud projects are still in the early stages. These include the fledgling cloud-to-mobile push notifications app, SimplePush , and the pre-alpha Mirage  "cloud operating system" which enables the creation of secure network applications across any Xen-ready cloud platform. The 2cloud Project , meanwhile, has the more ambitious goal of enabling complete mobile cloud platforms. All of the above apps support Android, and many support iOS. Among mobile OSes, Android is best equipped to support cloud applications, said Shah. Android supports sockets to help connect to remote services, and supplies a capable SQlite-based local database. It also offers a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) interchange stack to help parse incoming cloud data -- something missing in iOS. Unlike iOS and Windows Phone 7, Android provides background processing, which is useful for building a robust push infrastructure, said Shah. Without it, he added, users need to configure the app to work with a third-party push service. Most importantly, Android is the only major mobile OS to support inter-application communications. "Mobile apps are focused, and tend to do one thing only," said Shah. "When they cannot communicate with each other, you lose innovation." Comment from Sohil Shah, CEO OpenMobster: "I spoke too soon. iOS 5 now supports JSON out of the box. I am still working with a third party library which was needed in iOS 4 and earlier, and to stay backward compatible with those versions.  Anyways, it should have been supported a lot earlier considering the fact that AFAIK, Android has had it since the very beginning. "

Good discussion, but it really deserves a more in-depth thrashing.  The basic concept is that a perfect storm of mobility, cloud-computing and HTML5-JavaScript has set the stage for a major, massive shift in application development.  The shift from C++ to Java is now being replaced by a greater shift from Java and C++ to JavaScript-JSON-HTML5. Interesting, but i continue to insist that the greater "Perfect Storm" triggered in 2008, is causing a platform shift from client/server computing to full on, must have "cloud-computing".   There are three major "waves"; platform shifts in the history of computing at work here.  The first wave was "Mainframe computing", otherwise known as server/terminal.  The second wave was that of "client/server" computing, where the Windows desktop eventually came to totally dominate and control the "client" side of the client/server equation. The third wave began with the Internet, and the dominance of the WWW protocols, interfaces, methods and formats.  The Web provides the foundation for the third great Wave of Cloud-Computing. The Perfect Storm of 2008 lit the fuse of the third Wave of computing.  Key to the 2008 Perfect Storm is the world wide financial collapse that put enormous pressure on businesses to cut cost and improve productivity; to do more with less, or die.  The survival maxim quickly became do more with less people - which is the most effective form of "productivity".  The nature of the collapse itself, and the kind of centralized, all powerful bailout-fascists governments that rose during the financial collapse, guaranteed that labor costs would rise dramatically while also being "uncertain".  Think government controlled healthcare. The other aspects of the 2008 Perfect Storm are mobility, HTML5, cloud-computing platform availability, and, the ISO standardization of "tagged" PDF.   The mobility bomb kicked off in late 2007, with the introduction of the Apple iPhone.  No further explanation needed :) Th

Good run down of new big data technologies for Cloud Computing. The technologies are arranged in context beginning with Apache Hadoop and including HBase and MongoDb. Nice reference article.

ZOHO has demonstrated some very effective and easy to use data merging. They have also released a ZOHO Writer extension for Chrome that is awesome. The problem with "merge" is that, while full featured, the only usable data source is ZOHO CRM. Not good, but zCRM does fully integrate with ZOHO eMail, which enables the full two way transparent integration with zCRM. Easier to do than explain. Real Estate example excerpt: Zoho is smart, allowing you to integrate Gmail: The best of both worlds is available, because Zoho had the foresight to allow you to use Gmail and integrate your emails with the Zoho CRM system. Once you've set it up, you use Gmail the way you've always used it. I get to continue using all of the things I love about Gmail. But, every email, in or out of Gmail, attaches itself to the appropriate contact in the Zoho CRM system. When I send or receive an email in Gmail that is to or from one of my Zoho contacts or leads, the email automatically is picked up by Zoho and becomes a part of that contact/prospect's record, even though I never opened Zoho. If you've wondered about backing up Gmail, let Zoho do it: A bonus benefit in using Zoho mail is that you can set it up to receive all of your Gmail, sent and received, as well. It's a ready-made backup for your Gmail. So, if CRM isn't something you want to do with Zoho, at least set up the free email to copy all of your Gmail. And, if you're still using Outlook...why? The Internet is Improving Our Business at a Lower Cost: Here we have two free email systems that give you amazing flexibility and backup. Then the Zoho CRM system, with the email module installed, is only $15/month. You can do mass marketing emails, auto-responders, and take in new contacts and prospects with Web forms. Once you tie Gmail and Zoho together, your email and CRM will be top-notch, at a very low cost. Though you may wish for one, there isn't a reasonably priced "does it all" solution out there. This is an

A "Living Standard?" Sorry, WHATWG, but "standard" has a legal definition and minimum requirements; you're operating outside the law. WHATWG chooses what they think they can get away with and ignoring competition law.

Web site for Andreessen Horowitz VC. List of blogs for general partners. The reason for linking into a16z is the $11.2 Million they invested in Meteor! Meteor is awesome. My guess is that Meteor will provide a very effective Cloud platform to replace or extend the Windows Client/Server business productivity platform. Many VC watchers are wondering if a16z can recover the investment? Say what? IMHO this is for all the marbles. Platform is everything, and Cloud Computing is certain to replace Client/Server over time. Meteor just move that time frame from a future uncertainty to NOW. The Windows Productivity Platform has dominated Client/Server computing since the introduction of Windows 4 WorkGroups (v3.11) in 1992. Key technologies that followed or were included in v3.11 were DDE, OLE, MAPI, ODBC, ActiveX, and Visual Basic scripting - to name but a few. Meteor is an open source platform that hits these technologies directly with an approach that truly improves the complicated development of all Cloud based Web Apps - including the sacred Microsoft Cow herd of client/server business productivity apps. Meteor nails OLE and ODBC like nothing i've ever seen before. Very dramatic stuff. Maybe they are nailing shut the Redmond coffin in the process - making that $11.2 Mill a drop in the bucket considering the opportunity Meteor has cracked open. The iron grip Microsoft has on business productivity is so tight and so far reaching that one could easily say that Windows is the client in Client/Server. But it took years to build that empire. With this investment, Meteor could do it in months. Compound documents are the fuel in Windows business productivity and office automation systems. Tear apart a compound document, and you'll find embedded logic for OLE and ODBC. Sure, it's brittle, costly to develop, costly to maintain, and a bear to distribute. Tear apart a Meteor productivity service and you'll find the same kind of OLE-ODBC-Script

When you fail to reach a goal - say, for instance, you give an important presentation and it doesn't go well - you become the detective (once again, largely unconsciously). You gather up the usual suspects to see who is responsible for your failure: lack of innate ability, lack of effort, poor preparation, using the wrong strategy, bad luck, etc. Of all of these possible culprits, it's lack of innate ability we most frequently hold responsible, like the much-maligned butler in an Agatha Christie novel. In Western countries - and nowhere more so than in the U.S. - innate ability is the go-to explanation for all of our successes and our failures. The problem is that the evidence - the kind gathered by scientists over the last thirty years of study of motivation and achievement - suggests that innate ability is rarely to blame for either succeeding or falling short. (If you've blamed your poor performances in the past on a lack of ability, don't feel bad. We've all done it. The butler seems guilty. Just please don't do it anymore.) If we are going to ever improve performance, we need to place blame where it belongs. We need solid evidence about where we went wrong. Unfortunately, that's the kind of evidence that usually doesn't make it to our consciousness on its own, making self-diagnosis practically impossible. We need help getting the right answers.

Nice article by Sanjeev Kumar of iBE.net explaining how ISV's can move their customer business systems and processes to the Cloud, and why. Sanjeev is Product Manager for Business Analytics at iBE.net, which builds mobile and cloud-based business management software for small and midsized organizations. For more information visit www.ibe.net.

"Y Combinator-backed startup, Grid, is based around the idea that a tablet should be a great place for spreadsheets. Indeed, as Leong told me earlier this week, his idea is to reinvent the spreadsheet around touch, all the tools and sensors available on mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad, and the way normal people (as opposed to Excel power users) actually use them. "

Florian's docx reader is now available for iOS high-touch devices.  Extreme fidelity for reading/viewing native docx documents.  I hope he is working on a Chrome eXtension version!!!!   The world urgently needs WEB ready - Web view-able docx business documents.   Conversion of docx to HTML sucks.   The ultimate Visual Document system would enable users to work entirely in the native document format of the authoring system.  Florian's reader can do this, but so far he's limited to iOS.  Seems to me that the exploding sync-share-store market sector (DropBox, Box, Egnyte, SugarSync, etc) really need native document viewers that are HTM5 browser ready. " Naverage Reader HD Features: ... Designed for business documents. View your business document in an unbelievable quality. .....Tracked Changes Support. View text insertions, text deletions and comments on your iPad. ..... Layout Fidelity. Headers and footers, footnotes, tables, paragraph numbering, frames, graphics layout optimized for business documents. .....Font Embedding. Corporate fonts on your iPad. .docx-compatible. Compatible with the new Microsoft® Word format (.docx)."