All posts by : Between the Lines

51 of 173 | Dash brings the Internet inside the car - At the Web 2.0 Summit, Dash Navigation showed of what it called the world’s first connected navigation platform. The GPS device uses Wi-Fi and the cellular network to connect to the Internet. What’s unique is that the Dash device can mashup with Web services. For example, with a Zillow feed users can see what houses [...] ...

52 of 173 | On-demand software squared: Coupa launches SaaS e-procurement system running on Amazon’s EC2 service - Coupa will launch an on-demand e-procurement software suite on Monday that is built on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud Web service. For those keeping score at home that makes the Coupa suite an on-demand service running on an on-demand service. The launch also makes Coupa one of Amazon’s early corporate customers building a product on the e-tailer’s [...] ...

53 of 173 | SOA demand gives IBM services boost - IBM’s second quarter results were strong amid growth in its services business. Big Blue said Wednesday that earnings per share from continuing operations were $2.33 billion, or $1.55 a share, including a gain of 5 cents a share related to the sale of its printing services division. Backing that gain out IBM reported earnings of [...] ...

54 of 173 | News to know: QuickTime holes; SOA shortages; Motorola stumbles - Notable headlines: Ryan Naraine: Apple plugs eight more QuickTime holes. Patch Watch: Critical updates from Adobe, Cisco, Symantec, McAfee. Microsoft should block that IE-to-Firefox attack vector. Joe McKendrick: Survey hints at SOA skills shortages to come. Larry Dignan: Start the Zander countdown: Motorola warns (again). Larry Dignan: Revisiting the Oracle 11g upgrade decision (and 400 potential ROI cases). Changing market [...] ...

55 of 173 | News to know: Apple’s update barrage; SOA for masses; Patch cycles - Notable headlines:  Apple, Cisco extend negotiations on iPhone name. Apple to re-enter the sub-notebook market. iPhone / iTablet dock - inductive charging. Apple releases torrent of software updates. Apple fixes iChat, Finder (MoAB) flaws. Does Microsoft's patch cycle need fixing? Browser beware: Unpatched holes in Firefox, IE 7. Hack lets intruders sneak into home routers. iPod meets Campaign 2008: [...] ...

56 of 173 | Podcast: Windows Mobile 6, virtualization, SOA for the masses and more… - This week on the Dan & David Show, David checks out Microsoft's Windows Mobile version 6 platform. We also discuss how competition in the virtualization space in heating up (always good for buyers), what Microsoft means by Vista "Ready" and Vista "Capable," and how SOA methods (mashups, assemblers, widgets, etc.) are becoming more usable by [...] ...

57 of 173 | SOA for the masses: Widgets, pipes and teqlets - For many years SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture–building composite applications by assembling components from multiple sources within and beyond an enterprise) and its antecedents have been the province of the developer priesthood. Mere mortals, lacking programming skills, have not been privy to arcane, powerful secrets of SOA codes. Now the power of SOA is starting to be [...] ...

58 of 173 | Using Amazon Web services podcast - In a recent conversation on IT Conversations, Doug Kaye and Jeff Barr discuss Doug's sophisticated application built on top of Amazon Web services. The model offers considerable benefits to start-ups, but requires a different approach to the architecture. ...

59 of 173 | Glimpsing the future with Amazon’s Web services - Doug Kaye's architecture for a new podcasting platform provides a glimpse of computing's future with it's sophisticated use of Amazon's Web services. ...

60 of 173 | Demo 07: Aggregate Knowledge revs up discovery engine - Aggregate Knowledge is making retailer Overstock.com very happy. The company's Web service observes the anonymous behavior of people coming to the Web site and surfaces content relevant to what is on the page. It's a kind of recommendation engine, but unlike Amazon doesn't use any explicit personal data. The people who visited a page about [...] ...

61 of 173 | Amazon: 220,000 developers signed up for Amazon Web Services - Amazon says there are 55 percent more developers using Amazon Web Services as of Dec. 31 compared to a year ago. In total, more than 220,000 developers are registered to use Amazon's Web services. That was one of the interesting nuggets embedded in Amazon's fourth quarter and fiscal 2006 results. For the record, Amazon reported [...] ...

62 of 173 | Demo 07: Remote mobile management via 3G - Alcatel-Lucent showed a prototype of its Mobile Endpoint Management System (which the company called the Evros Project for some reason), a 3G wireless platform for managing remote mobile computers. The 3G-based PCMCIA card includes a processor, operating system, battery, memory, GPS, a VPN client and two-factor authentication. Connected via the card, a missing laptop can be [...] ...

63 of 173 | Oracle launches 5 new releases; touts integration, on-demand - Oracle president Charles Phillips said Wednesday that the company has released five new flavors of its applications that will all interconnect to each other. It is also allowing its independent software vendors connect those systems to other systems via SOA. The effort is the next step in Oracle's Fusion vision where all of its apps [...] ...

64 of 173 | News to know: Vista questions; Scoble’s bad week; LinkedIn spam - Notable headlines: Net pioneer predicts overwhelming botnet surge. Adobe: Make room for Photoshop Lightroom. GM: ‘Stand by. We’re about to spam you.’ Will Oracle launch Unbreakable MySQL? News Corp. shuns Fox Interactive in ROO deal. Will new architecture association help drive SOA skillsets? Big software firms take aim at Web 2.0. Vista launches: Vista: Where are the killer apps? Vista skepticism pervades, may be misplaced. Buying [...] ...

65 of 173 | How to make SOA really funny - As part of my daily reading, I check out Dennis Howlett's AccMan blog, and today was a special treat. He posted about Dan Ziman's hilarious "Greg the Architect" video, which skewers the SOA will save the IT world mentality.      ...

66 of 173 | Mashup Camp: Geeks plot future of Web - David has been at Mashup Camp 3 in Cambridge this week. Martin Lamonica of news.com was there and filed a report, about geeks plotting the future of the Web. As Chris Radcliff, a Web developer at Eventful, put it:  "This is taking the SOA idea and applying it to the mess that is the real [...] ...

67 of 173 | SAP, Oracle under the SOA, on-demand gun - SAP's first fourth quarter miss in seven years has analysts painting a grim picture in the enterprise applications market as new trends such as services oriented architecture (SOA) win out. The picture goes something like this: SAP's big miss in the fourth quarter is likely to give it a small first half deal pipeline, says [...] ...

68 of 173 | Buzz builds early for RIM’s Indigo - It's no secret that Research In Motion's Pearl device is a big hit, but folks are already speculating on how the company's next "Indigo" and "Crimson" smartphones will fare. The Indigo and Crimson codenames are rumored to be different flavors of an upcoming BlackBerry 8800. These versions will build on the Pearl's [...] ...

69 of 173 | News to know: 100 million data breaches; Cisco’s iPhone - Headlines of the day:  10 companies where SOA made a difference in 2006  The iPhone is out–it just belongs to Cisco. Gizmodo said it would break the iPhone news and it did–sort of. Cisco is announcing the iPhone, a VOIP phone put out by Linksys. What will Apple call [...] ...

70 of 173 | Yahoo shakeup, SAP’s ecosystem, Open XML, iPhone and more… - This week on the Dan & David Show, we discuss the recent shakeup at Yahoo, the latest in the HPgate scandal, the substance of SAP's analyst summit, standardization of Microsoft's Open XML format, and whether Apple's rumored iPhone can succeed. David starts off the show talking about his ZDNet new blog, Testbed, and points to [...] ...

71 of 173 | SAP bets on enterprise SOA, but are customers ready? - "It’s not necessary to buy companies to get growth,” said SAP CEO Henning Kagermann, speaking at the company’s fourth annual analyst summit. He was referring to rival Oracle’s approach to growth, spending more than $20 billion on acquisitions, and pointed to SAP’s 11 consecutive quarters of growth and market share gains as evidence that his [...] ...

72 of 173 | SAP crossing the chasm by the end of 2007 - Following SAP CEO Henning Kagermann’s  presentation at SAP fourth annual analyst summit, Shai Agassi, president of the Product & Technology Group, laid out the company's technical vision. He believes that SAP is in position to lead the chasm crossing from the client-server model to enterprise SOA, and become the dominant software platform.  He cited Geoffrey Moore's [...] ...

73 of 173 | Examining Salesforce.com’s ERP containment strategy - Salesforce.com launches its latest ecosystem extension with a bunch of connectors to a variety of applications. Nick Carr reports that McKinsey & Co. will release a survey showing that 61 percent of CIOs at North American companies with sales over $1 billion are planning to adopt one or more software as a service (SaaS) application. [...] ...

74 of 173 | Salesforce.com building out connector ecosystem - Salesforce.com’s latest ecosystem expansion is focused on AppConnect, an extension of the AppExchange marketplace for connectors that integrate its platform with a variety of applications and services, including ERP systems, Web services, desktop applications and middleware. Connectors have become an important part of salesforce.com's growth. In the last quarter, API transactions accounted for more than [...] ...

75 of 173 | Socialtext meets SharePoint with Socialpoint - A bottom up open source and top down proprietary collaboration platform, enterprise wiki Socialtext and Microsoft's SharePoint Portal Server, have come together in SocialPoint. Built with Socialtext 2.0 Wiki Web Services and SharePoint Web Parts, SocialPoint allows SharePoint to authenticate to multiple wikis, as well as display recent changes and pages and allow editing [...] ...

76 of 173 | Microsoft’s Desktop Windows staff: We love Javascript. Microsoft’s Mobile Windows staff: What’s Javascript? - When AJAX, otherwise known as Asynchronous Javascript and XML, first became all the rage (mostly thanks to Google), Microsoft didn't waste anytime reminding AJAX-watchers that it pioneered the idea of mass-distributed AJAX-based applications with its browser-based version of Outlook (aka: Outlook Web Access or OWA for short). See Will the real AJAX pioneer please stand [...] ...

77 of 173 | Office 2.0: Post-conference wrap up - Office 2.0 Conference host Ismael Ghalimi wrapped up the event in a blog post, including his own revised definition of the what Office 2.0 means.  "Office productivity environment enabled by online services used through a Web browser. By storing data online and relying on applications provided as Web services, it fosters collaboration and extends mobility, while [...]...

78 of 173 | Teqlo to let users assemble Web applications - Jeff Nolan left SAP about a month ago, and I have been waiting for him to resurface. He turned up at Teqlo (formerly Abgenial Systems), which is building a development environment for assembling applications from Web services and a runtime environment for hosting and managing applications. Users can invite their others to use their [...]...

79 of 173 | Apex signals a shift in the software landscape - The software landscape is changing. PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield is heading up Workday, which is a pure on demand, Web services enterprise software play, following salesforce.com's lead, due for official launch on November 6. He was in attendance at Salesforce.com's roll out yesterday of its latest edition and Apex programming language and platform. AMR Research [...]...

80 of 173 | ActiveGrid recipe: Soak in XML. Integrate. Scale. - For companies looking to speed up integration between new and legacy systems (or, just new and new systems), I've seen a lot of products out that there that use Web services standards (namely XML) to (1) give everything that needs to be integrated a common XML interface and (2) provide the graphical app dev environment [...]...

81 of 173 | Dave Duffield sheds light on his Workday - PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield and friends have been working in their post-Oracle era on a new set of enterprise applications built from the ground up on modern technology–XML, SOA, Web services–to enable an "innovative core design." The Workday Web site has a preview, but it's more of a statement of position–no screenshots, test drives or [...]...

82 of 173 | Mulesource gets behind open source ESB platform - Open source is well known as disruptive software industry force in the guise of operating systems (Linux, Solaris), servers (Apache, TomCat, JBoss), databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL) and other categories, ranging from business intelligence (JasperSoft, Pentaho) to system management (Qlusters, GroundWork). The latest project to come out of the shadows to challenge the incumbent, proprietary software vendors is [...]...

83 of 173 | DemoFall 2006: VoIP upstarts - Jahah launched a Web service that makes most phone calls free about six months ago, and today at DemoFall 2005 the company introduced a version of its service that lives on cell phones. Jahah Mobile currently supports Java-based and Symbian TM S60 version 7.x or 8.x phones.  Phone calls are routed through the Jahah [...]...

84 of 173 | WebEx expands platform with workflow and apps - WebEx is pushing beyond the boundaries of its Web conferencing, adding a custom workflow engine and composite application framework to its collaborative environment. The new service, called WebEx Connect, is due for release in Q1 2007, and is built on the company’s on-demand MediaTone network. WebEx Connect takes a bottoms up, lightweight, loosely coupled approach [...]...

85 of 173 | Widgetbox launches widget marketplace - Widgetbox formally launched a new service that provides a directory of Web widgets and supporting platform to build, syndicate and manage small, dynamic Web services that can be embedded on Web pages. Widgetbox CEO Ed Anuff believes that his company’s widget platform, like RSS, can provide a standardized way to build and syndicate modular Web [...]...

86 of 173 | If the URL exists, you must acquit: Part II - In the first installment of If the URL exists, you must acquit, I made a case for why Jon Udell had done no wrong when  he essentially pointed to a URL from an XML file. I argued that this is really no different than pointing to a URL from an HTML file (aka: a standard [...]...

87 of 173 | Microsoft patent non-assertion covenant is remarkable - Microsoft has issued a declaration -- something it calls the Open Specification Promise -- that it won't assert certain Web services patents it holds (or may hold in the future). Martin Lamonica reports: Microsoft is pledging not to assert its patents pertaining to nearly three dozen Web services specifications--a move designed to ease concerns [...]...

88 of 173 | Inside Amazon's EC2 - Call it "utility computing" or "Web-scale computing" or "on-demand infrastructure." Whatever the case, Amazon is hoping that its new EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud--why not just S4?) Web service (in the larger sense, as both an interface and an on demand platform) will turn into a big business. In effect, Amazon is leveraging its massive infrastructure [...]...

89 of 173 | Mobilizing the river of news - Dave Winer is working his magic again. The father of blogging, RSS, OPML, and XML-RPC was growing frustrated trying to get readable news feeds on a mobile device (Blackberry, Treo, Q, etc.), and whipped together a script for delivering clean, text (no graphics) feeds that update every 10 minutes. Check out the New York Times [...]...

90 of 173 | HP's Mercury acquisition fortells changes for SOA infrastructure - As Dan Farber mentioned earlier this week, HP acquired Mercury. Not long ago, of course, Mercury acquired Systinet, who's product line includes a very capable SOA registry (I reviewed Systinet's registry last year for InfoWorld.) This makes the HP acquisition very interesting from a SOA perspective. HP's [...]...

91 of 173 | AlwaysOn: Virtualization re-inventing the data center -  Virtualization, along with SOA, multi-core processors and other technologies, is changing the economics of data centers. "It's the biggest thing going on it IT," said Diane Greene, president and founder of virtualization pioneer VMware during a panel at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit. "It's front and center in the mind of CIOs because they can [...]...

92 of 173 | What's missing from AppExchange - Ismael Ghalimi has a good post on Salesforce.com's AppExchange, following up on a discussion among the Enterprise Irregulars, a group of smart enterprise bloggers submitting stories to a site using CrispyNews, which provides a service for creating Digg-like community sites. Ismael summarizes his AppExchange take:   ...adding server-side code execution, standards-based BPM, SOA-like integration and [...]...

93 of 173 | Emerging eGovernment mashups - When I was Utah's CIO, I wrote what I called the Web Services Manifesto to create a list of principles that I though all government agencies should follow whenever they created an online resource. Their goal: set the data free. The idea is that government can't ever hope to create [...]...

94 of 173 | If the URL exists, you must acquit: The Sequel - The last time I wrote "if the URL exists, you must acquit," it had to do with the way John Udell had basically published the URL to an audio file on a Web-based XML page.  In his case, the end result was a podcast feed for NPR's This American Life that Internet users could point [...]...

95 of 173 | Microsoft and ODF, eBay and Google Checkout, Mashup Camp and more… - This week on The Dan & David Show we talk about Microsoft's "support" for an open source project that will translate Microsoft's Open XML format into OpenDocument Format (ODF). We also discuss the eBay's banning of GPay (Google Checkout), adding it to the list of other unacceptable pay services, and provide an overview on the [...]...

96 of 173 | The Microsoft/ODF Day After: Almost everyone gets it wrong - Today, the day after the big news, there are more headlines than I can count regarding Microsoft's sponsorship of an open source-based translator for converting Office Open XML formatted documents to OpenDocument Format (ODF) formatted documents. I think it's important to point out that many of the headlines and stories either got the news [...]...

97 of 173 | I want you to make me money - I'm working on a Strategy Guide on SOA governance for InfoWorld. One of the articles we're including is this case study of Thompson Prometric. What caught my eye, however, was this quote from the article: At first, [Christopher] Crowhurst presented the idea to Thomson Prometric CEO Michael Brannick as [...]...

98 of 173 | MS: "OpenDoc too slow!" IBM: "MS Open XML too heavy!" - Have mud. Will sling.According to ZDNet UK's Ingrid Marson, Microsoft is saying that the OpenDocument format is too slow: "The use of OpenDocument documents is slower to the point of not really being satisfactory," Alan Yates, the general manager of Microsoft's information worker strategy, told ZDNet UK on Wednesday. "The Open [...]...

99 of 173 | Mash-ups, XML, and visualizing Flickr - Still at WWW2006, I also attended a panel moderated by Rohit Khare on Mashups, Web data, and APIs. Other participants were Frank Mantek, Jeff Barr, Dan Theurer, and Kevin Lawver. These guys represent Google, Amazon, Yahoo! and AOL respectively. Perhaps the most interesting thing in the whole panel [...]...

100 of 173 | RightNow nets Salesnet, targeting Salesforce.com - Consolidation in the software-as-a-service space took a step forward as RightNow acquired Salesforce.com competitor Salesnet. According to the press release, the "acquisition will accelerate RightNow's customer experience management development efforts by combining RightNow's patented knowledge foundation with Salesnet's sophisticated workflow engine." In more plain English, RightNow, which is known more for its call center solution [...]...