Open Web

Good stuff. The Internet-payment sector is really heating up: Square, PayPal, mFoundry and my favorite - DWOLLA. The credit-card-payment-industry is still in control, but you can see from the heavy investments they are making in Web based systems, that the mobility phenomenon has them concerned. Dwolla is my favorite because of the innovative way they connect direct to the bank accounts of users, cutting the transaction and reconciliation cost from credit card standard 2.75% o a FLAT $0.25 cents!!!! Outstanding. Could prove very disruptive.

Simple, formerly known as "BankSimple" recently won an award as one of the 20 best stratups of 2011. Backed by Visa, Simple aggregates end user bank accounts, proving a single interface. Promises to get rid of bank fees entirely, and become a NEW Mobile Bank. Not sure this can be doen with Visa sitting in the drivers seat.

Extraordinary stuff. A few items in particular stood out for me: The Army Research Office's "Vibrating Belt"; TripLingo; DiDO, and the skin cell printer. Amazing stuff.

Good in depth article about Huddle, and their challenge to Microsoft SharePoint.  We met these guys at the 2006 and 2007 Office 2.0 conference in San Fran.  Lengthy conversations about the Windows Productivity Environment and how Microsoft built that platform.  Need to take a closer look at how far they have come.  The Cloud is a greaqt opportunity for a new Productivity Platform.

Many are joining the boycott against SOPA, and need an alternative to domain host and registrar GoDaddy.com.  Hover.com has been suggested as a good replacement.   The SOPA list of crony capitalist and fascist supporters can be found at http://goo.gl/udScr.

Use case for Google Apps described.  This is very interesting stuff and for sure i need to take a much closer look at how others are using Google Apps.  The integration with MailChimp is very interesting.  Good stuff.  As i read through this, i found myself wondering about using Google Apps Document templates in MSOffice 11???

Good article but leaves out any mention of WebKit and incredible impact that open source project has had on HTML5 and the future of the Web.  I left a lengthy comment explaining this.  Also referenced ODF, OASIS and Corporate support of standards and OSS projects.

Good article describing Node.js.  The Node.js Summitt is taking place in San Francisco on Jan 24th - 25th.  http://goo.gl/AhZTD I'm wondering if anyone has used Node.js to create real time Cloud ready compound documents?  Replacing MSOffice OLE-ODBC-ActiveX heavy productivity documents, forms and reports with Node.js event widgets, messages and database connections?  I'm thinking along the lines of a Lotus Notes alternative with a Node.js enhanced version of EverNote on the front end, and Node.js-Hadoop productivity platform on the server side? Might have to contact Stephen O'Grady on this.  He is a featured speaker at the conference. excerpt: At first, Chito Manansala (Visa & Sabre) built his Internet transaction processing systems using the venerable Java programming language. But he has since dropped Java and switched to what is widely regarded as The Next Big Thing among Silicon Valley developers. He switched to Node. Node is short for Node.js, a new-age programming platform based on a software engine at the heart of Google's Chrome browser. But it's not a browser technology. It's meant to help build software that sits on a distant server somewhere, feeding an application to your PC or smartphone, and it's particularly suited to systems like the one Chito Manansala is building - systems that juggle scads of information streaming to and from other sources. In other words, it's suited to the modern internet. Two years ago, Node was just another open source project. But it has since grown into the development platform of the moment. At Yahoo!, Node underpins "Manhattan," a fledgling online service for building and hosting mobile applications. Microsoft is offering Node atop Windows Azure, its online service for building and hosting a much beefier breed of business application. And Sabre is just one of a host of big names using the open source platform to erect applications on their own servers. Node is based on the Javascript engine at th

Could have written this two years ago, but it is a sign of the times, and the advance towards a Cloud Productivity Platform that brings this issue front and center.  DropBox has many challengers (finally).  It's always seemed to me that sync-share-store is a foundation kind of service.  Another would be that of real time connectivity to data and transaction processing systems - Cloud ODBC.  The great transition is indeed underway.  And this is a good day for me.  I've got tow companies that made the 451 list!  Now, if only DropBox will listen.

Must read interview. Marc Andreessen explains his five big ideas, taking us from the beginning of the Web, into the Cloud and beyond. Great stuff! ... (1) 1992 - Everyone Will Have the Web ... (2) 1995 - The Browser will the Operating System ... (3) 1999 - Web business will live in the Cloud ... (4) 2004 - Everything will be Social ... (5) 2009 - Software will Eat the World excerpt: Technology is like water; it wants to find its level. So if you hook up your computer to a billion other computers, it just makes sense that a tremendous share of the resources you want to use-not only text or media but processing power too-will be located remotely. People tend to think of the web as a way to get information or perhaps as a place to carry out ecommerce. But really, the web is about accessing applications. Think of each website as an application, and every single click, every single interaction with that site, is an opportunity to be on the very latest version of that application. Once you start thinking in terms of networks, it just doesn't make much sense to prefer local apps, with downloadable, installable code that needs to be constantly updated.

"We could have built a social element into Mosaic. But back then the Internet was all about anonymity."
Anderson: Assuming you have enough bandwidth.

Andreessen: That's the very big if in this equation. If you have infinite network bandwidth, if you have an infinitely fast network, then this is what the technology wants. But we're not yet in a world of infinite speed, so that's why we have mobile apps and PC and Mac software on laptops and phones. That's why there are still Xbox games on discs. That's why everything isn't in the cloud. But eventually the technology wants it all to be up there.

Anderson: Back in 1995, Netscape began pursuing this vision by enabling the browser to do more.

Andreessen: We knew that you would need some pro

Interesting article describing a recent press conference where Microsoft introduced their latest SkyDrive alternative to Apple's iCloud initiative.  Having had considerable experience with SkyDrive and the entire "sync-share-store" Cloud category, I left a lengthy comment. Computerworld - Microsoft is pitching its SkyDrive online storage service to Office for Mac users, calling Apple's iCloud offering "not enough" for collaboration, file sharing and anywhere-access to documents. Microsoft released an OS X SkyDrive client preview two weeks ago, adding Macs to the list of devices -- Windows, particularly the upcoming Windows 8, iOS and Windows Phone -- with native support for the Dropbox-like service. On Monday, the Redmond, Wash. developer stumped for SkyDrive on its Office for Mac website. "With the SkyDrive for Mac OS X Lion preview, SkyDrive for Windows, and the release of SkyDrive for iPad, you can save and store your important documents or other files in the SkyDrive folder in Finder and access them from anywhere," the Office for Mac team wrote on its blog.

Good video walk through demonstrating Windows RT running on an Asus ARM-NVIDIA Tegra tablet.  Very cool.  One thing that caught my attention though was the comment that the entire MSOffice Suite will be included with every Windows RT OS when it ships in November of 2012.  Wow.  Doesn't answer the compat-interop issue Intel (x86) is raising.  But certainly the stakes are very high here. excerpt: The annual Computex show is happening in Taiwan this week, and we're finally getting a look at some real Windows 8 devices. Below is a video from NVIDIA and Asus, demonstrating a new tablet running Windows RT. It's called the Windows RT Tablet 600. (Windows RT is the version of Windows 8 that will only run on tablets.)  The Tablet 600 looks a lot like Asus's excellent Android tablet, the Transformer Prime, thanks to an optional keyboard dock that turns it into a laptop.

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

This works! The problem is the "sudo apt-get update" command returns a number of "W: GPG error:" messages, each referencing a http:// domain source in the sources.list file. After trying perhaps 20 different mehtods for dealing with this MInt-Ubuntu problem, this web site finally cracked it. Good explanation of how and why this problem comes up.

Summary: Collaborative document editing means multiple editors being able to edit a shared document at the same time.. Live and concurrent means being able to see the changes another person is making, keystroke by keystroke. Currently, there are already a number of products on the market that offer collaborative document editing. Some offer live concurrent editing, such as EtherPad and SubEthaEdit, but do not offer rich text. There are others that offer rich text, such as Google Docs, but do not offer a seamless live concurrent editing experience, as merge failures can occur. Wave stands as a solution that offers both live concurrent editing and rich text document support.  The result is that Wave allows for a very engaging conversation where you can see what the other person is typing, character by character much like how you would converse in a cafe. This is very much like instant messaging except you can see what the other person is typing, live. Wave also allows for a more productive collaborative document editing experience, where people don't have to worry about stepping on each others toes and still use common word processor functionalities such as bold, italics, bullet points, and headings. Wave is more than just rich text documents. In fact, Wave's core technology allows live concurrent modifications of XML documents which can be used to represent any structured content including system data that is shared between clients and backend systems. To achieve these goals, Wave uses a concurrency control system based on Operational Transformation.

Good article.  One of the first to go beyond the demo, recognizing that Wave is application platform - a wrapper for the convergence of communications and content. Excerpt: Wave is a new way to build distributed applications, and it will open the door to an explosion of innovation. What the Wave demo showed is support for a continuum from the shortest messages to longer and longer forms of content. All of it can be shared with precise control, tagged, searched. The version history is kept. No more mailing around a document. This takes the beauty of e-mail and wikis and extends it in a more flexible way to a much larger audience. Google Wave is a platform for creating distributed applications. Each Wave server can be involved in a number of conversations involving Wavelets, what most people would think of as a document. Wavelets are actually a much more powerful and general because they are based on XML, which means you can have lots of depth of content, like headings and subheadings of a book, but on steroids. Adding a document repository to XMPP is just revolutionary. The XMPP protocol manages the communication between the Wave servers so that all the Wavelets can synchronize as they are changed. Then Google finished the job by making Wavelets tag-able, searchable and versioned, so you can play back changes. But Google Wave goes beyond just managing the content--it also manages the programs that act on the content. At any level, a program can be assigned to a Wavelet to render it, that is, show it to a user and help manage the conversation. Google Wave also manages the distribution and management of these programs. The idea of a platform that combines management of the data and the code is really powerful.

Michael Hickins weighs in the war between Microsoft and Google.  This time he focuses in Microsoft's attempt to move the point of assembly from the desktop productivity environment to an exclusive MS-Web center. The question is whether enterprises will move to Google (or some other standards- and Web-based vendor) in time, or whether they will get trapped in the fly-paper of Microsoft code, from which they will be hard pressed to detach their documents. This was the problem Massachusetts faced when the state wanted to abandon Microsoft in favor of standards-based applications; their legacy documents were filled with Microsoft code they couldn't translate cleanly into another format. When the race is finished, that may turn out to be Microsoft's greatest strength. While the rest of the world embraces openness and cooperation, Microsoft remains proprietary and closed like a fist.

Talk about a game changer: Excerpt:  An epic battle is brewing out West with much more than a lucrative technology contract at stake: Microsoft Office or Google's cloud? As the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday, Microsoft and Google are bidding for a $7.25 million contract to replace the city of Los Angeles' outdated email system. Los Angeles put out a call for bids in 2008. "Google Apps got the nod because city administrators believed it would be cheaper and less labor-intensive," writes LA Times reporter David Sarno. We all knew this day of reckoning was coming. For Microsoft, the fight to hold on to its Office base is on. Google Apps, the Web-based office suite that includes the viral Gmail, promises less overhead and potentially big savings to fiscally strapped cities, corporations and college campuses. In addition to dispatching teams of lobbyists, both Steve Ballmer and Eric Schmidt have offered to put in appearances at city hall, if city officials think it will help, according to a city councilman quoted in the article.

Excellent Wave coverage from Scott M. Fulton III.  The Hollywood Movie industry use case scenario is very interesting.  But Scott is one of the few people to draw an analogy between Google Wave convergence of concurrent communications and collaborative content and the early days of the Microsoft Office Productivity Platform where we saw DDE, OLE and MAPI rise and rule. Excerpt: Today, Google is expected to invite as many as 100,000 more participants into the private beta of its concurrent communications system, called Wave. As that happens, many more participants will be able to not only communicate with one another in a more granular form of real-time, but potentially collaborate on work and projects. It's that latter part of the program that's supposed to congeal at some point into a collective sense of purpose. But this time, unlike Microsoft's first experiments with Dynamic Data Exchange between applications on the same computer three decades ago, there isn't yet a clear, single purpose for the system. No question it could bring individuals as close together as people separated by indefinite distance could become; but as to the question of what they do with one another once they do get together, Google is hoping this question -- like so many others it puts out there in the open -- resolves itself. Yesterday, Google offered links to a number of different independent assessments of the possible, eventual purpose of Google Wave, though it offered them as use-case scenarios rather than projections of possible goals for the product...which is what many actually were.