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Looks like Google sent out another bunch of invitations (2620) for Wave & since most of my friends are already on Wave, I thought why not give it away. So, in case you want one, just drop a comment (don’t forget to protect it against spamming by substituting @ with [at] & the [...Nov. 27, 2009 03:00 AM EST Reads: 2,960 Replies: 129
At our Seminar last month, Managing FOSS to Lower Costs and Achieve Business Results, several participants asked about the dynamics of FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) projects that reach a crossroads (a failure, a merger, loss of key personnel, etc). I had not expected that conce...
That Android has got a lot of publicity and public endorsement in the US is clear to all of us but the potential impact that Android can have is probably far beyond what you have thought. I am therefore posting some of my 'insights' in the subject. 
Google has announced a revised settlement [redlined pdf faq pdf] that it hopes will address the concerns raised by the Department of Justice and many other groups.
Here's a summary of the summary Google provides [pdf], although IANAL and I encourage you to read the summary, which ...
It is one thing to use open source software and evangelize its capabilities to a marketplace. It is quite another to actually attempt to contribute to that software. Orchestra is now investing in contributing to open source projects that benefit the small and midsize business market.
Under the pressure from Windows Azure release in a week, Amazon unveiled today a new AWS SDK for .NET Developers providing .NET developers the libraries, code samples, and documentation needed to build an AWS-powered application using any programming language capable of making .NET cal...
Javascript has suddenly matured and perhaps these are its best of times. There is a large number of JavaScript libraries vying for your attention and capture your heart. Review the article describing the various libraries on 
eZ Systems, the world´s largest open source content management software company, announced today that former IBM and BEA executive Christoph Rau will join the company as CEO, effective immediately.
SimpleOCR is the popular freeware OCR software with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide. SimpleOCR is also a royalty-free OCR SDK for developers to use in their custom applications. If you have a scanner and want to avoid retyping your documents, SimpleOCR is the fast, free way t...
Although my presentation focused on individual contributions, these lessons also apply to how businesses benefit by contributing to FOSS. When a business approaches a project they should attempt to build a symbiotic relationship with the community. Such a relationship involves followin...
This blog is part of a new educational initiative to foster a deeper understanding of the capabilities and issues involved with administering FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) to deliver concrete business benefits. Although our subject will sometimes become technical, we will strive...
I recently added 20 yards of distance to every club in my golf bag with no effort whatsoever (and the chipping now is sublime). For the non-golfers out there, this is quite a significant improvement. I have played the game for about 15 years achieved a reasonable standard and plateaued...
So what do you really look for in an interface engine? There is more to an IE than just being a pass-through of messages.
This article explores the use of geospatial information to provide a network-centric view of the mobile work place and the real-time location of your mobile assets. USAF Colonel John Boyd is credited with the concept of the OODA loop. The OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide and Act) is...
If you don’t understand why the Real Time Web is huge, you will soon.
Thanks to micro-blogging sites like Twitter, a constant stream of human-posted content has infiltrated the Web. This growing infiltration has created a bottoms up approach to content creation that via the progressi...
Today Amazon released its answer to SQL Azure, the hosted cloud database offered by Microsoft. The newest service form Amazon, the Amazon Relational Database Service, or Amazon RDS for short, now in beta, makes it easier for you to set up, operate, and scale a relational database in th...
In a note to the CCIF list, Sam Johnston informed us that Google too has continued on its promise to liberate our data as part of their Data Liberation Front project. This latest Google effort introduces a new feature that makes it much easier to get your content back out of the Cloud...
A new ‘internet’ has been born which can flatten the market place if not managed correctly. New opportunities create greater challenges for any company to stay ahead. Thanks to sites like Ulitzer the corporate world has finally embraced online social media as a real competitive advanta...
There seems to suddenly be a lot of focus on “data” and the ability for users consumers to pack up their data and take it wherever they want. Except for people attached to their i-Thing. I think users of i-Things were approached about the concept but were unable to get past the revelat...
In a recent post on a cloud computing mailing list, an old timer from the telecom days admitted that for him “being an independent consultant means about the same things as “being unemployed.” Over the past few years the joke was “you cannot swing a dead cat over your head in downtown...
Like many who were given early Google wave sandbox accounts, I didn't see the purpose at first. The rather buggy javascript laden interface was actually kind of slow and at times cumbersome and worst of all crashed my browser all the time. This was for the most practical of reasons, I ...
MapReduce (implementations include Hadoop and CloudDB) has gained popularity in the industry. It also serves as marketing fodder for several new-breed ADBMS vendors who now claim to support it in various
Many IT managers would love to move some of their applications out of the enterprise data center and into the cloud. It's a chance to eliminate a whole litany of costs and headaches: in capital equipment, in power and cooling, in administration and maintenance. Instead, just pay as you...
Russia "will" develop a new Web browser for federal employees. The news was published on infonews.ru. The project is funded by the Ministry of Defense and FSB (formerly KGB). According to infonews, "several million rubles will be spent on creation of Russian Web browser". They are pla...
A major uproar has been brewing in Sweden over a recent government ruling banning the word "bank" from any Swedish domains that do not fit the official definition of a financial banking institution. (Basically *bank.se) On Thursday The Pirate Bay 
Internet Explorer, particularly versions 6 and before, are the bane of any web developer's existence. The Internet Explorer versions Microsoft produced during the competion-free era between when Netscape died and Firefox came on the scene are masterpieces of monopolistic neglect. IE 5 ...
Wow. I’m impressed. For the past few days, Gmail has been hanging when I try to attach a file. It doesn’t matter what type of file it is or how big it is. More times than not, it hangs. The hang happens as soon as Gmail shows the bar that displays the percent loaded. I have to force-qu...
I’ve mentioned before that I run my small business, Crucial Point LLC, primarily by leveraging cloud computing capabilities. With this post I’ll mention a book that helped me do that: Google Apps: The Missing Manual. This book does a great job at capturing the core functionality of Goo...
Data loss is an unforeseen situations that could occur at any point, nevertheless of the hardware and software you are using. Data loss can harshly affect your business and may harm your company revenue as well as market reputation.
Here is an interesting news item which claims that UK online ad spend overtakes mainstream TV. The same news was corroborated by another post which stated that spending on online advertising surpasses TV. The news was little disconcerting because it did not seem to match with my ground...
Cloud computing is in fact a real phenomenon and does create great technological and business value. Simply put, cloud computing allows one to build network applications without having to worry about the network. So far, so good; but what is the catch?
Amazon Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) is a new type of storage designed specifically for Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS allows you to create volumes that can be mounted as devices by EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes behave as if they were raw unformatted external hard drives and...
In the case of Ulitzer, as a writer I am focused on getting readers from within an existing audience. There are already thousands of readers coming to the Ulitzer site, so if they are interested in my topics such as marketing, they will find my articles as well as others. Ulitzer all...
Interesting developments today in the scalable real time web front. In a rather unexpected move, Facebook has released a project called Tornado -- an open source version of the scalable, non-blocking web server and and tools that power FriendFeed.
... There was an interesting article in the news yesterday from an insurance company about which professions have the worst road accident records. Topping the list... ahead of sales managers and students... are computer engineers!!!
Being an engineer at heart (although my programmin...
There's a terrific colloquy between Google and Geoff Nunberg in response to Geoff's critique of Google's handling of the metadata attached to the books Google is digitizing (which I blogged about here). It's fascinating for its content, but also very cool as a conversation between a ...
Every time a new search engine pops up, bloggers, journalists and analysts get all worked up about its potential (or otherwise) to be a ‘Google Killer.’ I’ve written about this before, and really can’t understand the apparent obsession with ‘killing’ a company that’s continuing to do r...
Today, we are an early cohabitant of “The Cloud”, thanks in no small part to our adoption of all of the cool cloud enablers mentioned above. But to understand how cool cloud computing really is, you first have to understand that the cloud is still in its infancy, and already, it’s a c...
