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Move Over Taylor Swift, Occipital Brings Real-Time Panorama Creation to the iPhone

Taylor Swift has nothing on Boulder software startup Occipital. The pop star has been seen recently in an ad for the Sony TX7 Cyber-shot whose selling-point is the ability to create a panoramic image by sweeping the camera once from side-to-side. Occipital, makers of the popular RedLaser app (which eBay recently purchased from the startup), has brought this very same functionality one of the best selling cameras on the market today - the iPhone. Launching today in the AppStore, 360 Panorama (or just "360" for short) will allow iPhone users to do their best Taylor Swift impersonations by creating panoramic images with one sweep of their phones.

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Available for $2.99 in the AppStore as of right now, 360 Panorama should make an obvious addition to any avid iPhone photographer's collection of camera apps. Photography is a small hobby of mine, and I'm always on the hunt for hot new camera apps for the iPhone. When Occipital co-founder Vikas Reddy told me about the company's new app, I was very excited to get my hands on it and test it out in the field.

Previously, my favorite option for creating panoramas on my iPhone has been an app called AutoStitch. To make panoramas in AutoStitch, I have to first snap a series of pictures, making sure to leave enough overlap for each image to fit together with the next. Then I would fire up the app, select the right pictures, and wait about 30-60 seconds for the app to complete the stitching process.

With 360 Panorama, the time it takes to create a panoramic image is significantly reduced. Once the app loads, simply hold the phone up in the position you wish to begin the panorama, tap the screen, rotate the view either left of right and tap the "Save" button to store the panorama. Panoramas are created right before your eyes in real-time as you pan side-to-side, eliminating the uploading and waiting time in other apps.

"Literally every single frame is used. Behind the scenes, our computer vision-based system is processing every frame and calculating precisely how much you moved," says Reddy. "The vision system is extremely fast and precise, and there's nothing like it on the iPhone period -- panorama or otherwise."

So how well does the app actually work?

As for capturing and saving panoramas, the app works as advertised - at least on the iPhone 4 where gyroscopic readings help the app better determine movement. The speed and ease at which it can create panoramas is the selling-point of this app, and is the only area in which it beats apps like AutoStitch. The overall quality and resolution of the images, however, doesn't come close that seen from AutoStitch.

The example below is a 360-degree panorama captured in front of my house. Upon closer inspection, we can see vertical lines representing the various images captured by the app. Additionally, the app realigned the start and end points of the panorama (just right of the tree) to the middle of the image, causing a jarring overlap. On other attempts, the app misjudged where the images should begin and end, causing a large black void to fill the middle of the image.

The resolution of the images created with 360 Panorama is also much smaller than those that can be created using an app like AutoStitch. The above 360-degree shot is 2048 pixels wide at full resolution while this AutoStitch panorama of less than 90 degrees I made a few weeks ago is 3222 pixels wide.

AutoStitch also includes several handy features which 360 Panorama lacks - namely the ability to crop images. Users will need a third-party app to crop their images from 360, and will also be missing features like export settings and AutoStitch's advanced exposure blending.

The verdict for 360 Panorama is a bit of a toss-up. If you want the speed and ease of creating panoramas with the steady wave of a hand, then this is definitely an app you need to try out. But if you want higher quality and resolution from your panoramas, then you might be better off sticking with an app like AutoStitch.

Data Centers Suited For Dr. Evil and Servers, Too

The architectural style of a data center is not what you would think as being unique.

But data centers can have a certain style as illustrated in a recent post on Data Center Knowledge, which put together a collection that shows a level of creativity in how data centers are being designed.

Rob Snevely is the author of Enterprise Data Center Design and Methodology. He says the primary function of building a data center is in the detailed mechanical process of laying out the building for maximum density and equipment loads.

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But he also says design philosophies are being applied to data centers that fit with the modern times of the 21st century.

Here are a few that stand out:

"The Spy Who Loved Me" Bunker
The Bahnhof "James Bond Villain" Data Bunker in Stockholm, Sweden

On the city streets, people go about their day, unsuspecting that deep below the asphalt lies a bunker where Dr. Evil would feel right at home. It's the data center for Banhof, one of Sweden's largest ISPs. The features of this subterranean data center are a bit quirky. It includes greenhouses, waterfalls and German submarine engines. Your data is safe here. It is designed to withstand the force of a hydrogen bomb. Unusual? Yes. The architect started with the view that rock has its own symbolic representation of life. Space-themed conference room? Sweet.

Super-Sized Data Center
Microsoft Container Data Center in Chicago

In the city of broad shoulders is the big gulp of data centers. And who else but Microsoft would build a data center with such scale. The Microsoft data center is 700,000 square-feet and cost a whopping $500 million. It has its own "container canyon." This is like a garage where 40-foot trucks don't move but the data does. Truly massive.

Which Came First: Chickens or Computers?
Yahoo Computing Coop in Lockport, NY

Now this is our kind of data center. Chickens need good ventilation and so do servers! So why not build a data center that looks like a chicken coop and is meant to breathe, too?

And here we thought data centers were just big boring buildings.

Official BI 11g Launch Page

Google Places API Could Do For Check-ins What Google Maps Did For Maps

Google has begun opening up access to a new Application Programming Interface (API) called the Places API. Developers building apps that include a "check in at this place" feature can use the Places API to search across all the places users might check in for basic information like business name, address, phone number and other descriptive information. That information will be editable by the businesses listed and no caching of data is allowed, so apps will have to ping Places regularly for real-time data.

Making this data as free and easy to use as Google Maps is today could create a foundation for new location-savvy apps to bloom throughout the mobile web, with far less overhead than such apps have to wrestle with today in order to provide a rich user experience. One catch? All these apps will have to be integrated with Google's Adsense.

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Also available: rating information from the same business review sites that appear in Google Maps search results. So show me the best-rated coffee shop within a mile of me that's described as dog-friendly in user reviews. That would be awesome.

How it Might Be Used

When Google first began discussing the Places API in April, we discussed as an example a pizza restaurant that edited its delivery area on Google and then made that information available to apps that pinged the API for information.

Those kinds of examples are less likely to be implemented at first, since the first developers being allowed access to the API are people building check-in apps. But the possibilities beyond checking in are many and diverse.

Just as Google Maps made it easy for any developer to add a map and display location, the Places API could make it easy for any developer to search up to date information about any location for their application. At least that's what seems to be possible. The Terms of Service favoring search and prohibiting caching may prove frustratingly prohibitive.

That data may be free, but it will come at the expense of integrating with Google's Adsense platform. "Note that in order to be issued credentials for this service," the API documentation reads, "you must provide a valid Adsense publisher id that matches the Google account with which you are currently logged in." That's pretty smart of Google and maybe a little nefarious, but someone's got to pay the bills.

Why is Location so Hot?

Why is location becoming such a hot commodity? From one perspective, the proliferation of smartphones and the development of easy-to-use, compelling applications like Foursquare and MyTown are making it easier than ever for consumers to publish and leverage information about their location. Consumers want to do that for a variety of reasons, from recording their travel history to letting family know where they are to bragging about the hip places they hang out.

For developers, location data is a whole new world to pivot on when looking at feeds of user activity data. Our online activity has to date gone on in the placeless ether. Applications could offer features, highlight content or make recommendations based on things like our interests and social connections - but now any of that and more can be sorted by location. That's a very potent column to add to any spreadsheet, too. We're just beginning to see what all the recombinations of these types of data can look like.

It's an exciting new location-based world, and much of it may be powered by the Google Places API.

Twitter Annotations Not Coming Soon, After All

This spring at Twitter's first developer conference Chirp the big splash was a forthcoming feature called Annotations. The feature will allow publishing software to annotate Tweets with a wide open variety of metadata, which could then be read and analyzed by other software. Annotations are going to be big, if and when they launch.

At Chirp it was said that the Annotations feature would launch in the second or third quarter of this year. Now the company's developer advocate, Taylor Singletary, said today on the Twitter developers list that it's not going to work out that way. "We haven't yet announced a release date," he said in response to an inquiry, "and it's still a ways in the future while we tackle some other projects."

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We've got an inquiry in with Twitter asking what that means, but it seems clear that the company is slammed with technical challenges, has other priorities and wrongly estimated the roadmap for this very important part of the platform. (Update: see below.)

Here's how Annotations will work. It will allow publishing software to mark-up tweets with any kind of characteristic or namespace (local weather when and where a twit did tweet, for example) and any kind of value - cloudy with a chance of meatballs, for example. Twitter messages are fairly rich with metadata already and incredibly easy to analyze and build on top of, but Annotations would open that up so far the sky's the limit.

It's worth mentioning that Twitter's unveiling of Annotations at Chirp happened around the same time as, and was widely compared with, Facebook's launching of personalized content widgets and tentacles expanding all over the web, among other things. Facebook shipped its announced project, for better or for worse.

Twitter is Busy

In another email on the same list today, Singletary said that the processing of white-listing applications to ping Twitter's servers with a production-level frequency was clogged with backlog, growing more critical in its evaluations and being re-evaluated.

Numerous advertising technologies have been rolled out since Chirp as well. Annotations is a hugely ambitious strategy, and the squabbling over namespaces and standards was one that Twitter said it was going to let the market work out on its own. That made some people quite unhappy.

We've asked Twitter for clarification on the revised Annotations roadmap and will update this post with the company's response.

Update: A Twitter spokesperson responded to our inquiry and said that yes, Annotations will launch. "We'll still launch Annotations. The team that was working on Annotations is currently focused on our number one priority, which is site stability." No doubt Annotations could themselves pose scalability challenges. They could at least blow our minds, if not a series of related servers.

Below is an image of what each Tweet looks like under the hood right now, before annotations. (Click for full size view.) Each of those fields is powerful, but inflexible and defined by the company. Imagine a new one that's open to being defined however a publishing tool sees fit. That's the vision behind Annotations.

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links for 2010-07-30

• Oracle Business Intelligence 11g - New Features: Custom Groups
  Karthic Balasubramani??documents a new Oracle BI 11g feature that allows the creation of a custom hierarchy in the presentation layer.
  (tags: oracle otn businessintelligence)
• Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control: Seminar on Consolidation on Grid Computing
  Porus Homi Havewala shares the details on a?seminar he'll conduct on behalf of Oracle Platinum Partner S&I Systems on 13th August in Singapore.
  (tags: oracle otn grid enterprisearchitecture)
• Scripting Languages at the Oracle Tuxedo Virtual Developer Day: Review (PHP and Oracle: )
  Christopher Jones shares his experience as a student in the first Oracle Tuxedo Virtual Developer Day.
  (tags: oracle otn tuxdeo integration architect grid)
• Raul Goycoolea: Establish Order Management in Telecommunications
  "[Telecommunications] market players have to make their systems more effective, flexible and scalable to efficiently manage an increasingly complex product portfolio. This is a multi-dimensional problem that requires optimized processes, accurate operational data and integrated solutions." --?Raul Goycoolea
  (tags: oracle otn enteprisearchitecture)
• @omebos: Agile Enterprise Architecture: Two Way Traffic
  "Enterprise Architecture basically needs to describe the Business processes, the information demand, the applications overview and the technical grounds. This is the blueprint on which we can build our system. But how can we make sure we don’t overdo it? Simple: make it Agile." --?Douwe Pieter van den Bos
  (tags: oracle otn enterprisearchitecture)
• Oracle SOA Governance 11g: Lifecycle Management
  "This course trains SOA architects and project managers on the use of Oracle Governance products, including Oracle Enterprise Repository and Oracle Service Registry. Students learn how to organize, manage and monitor reusable assets throughout the entire SOA lifecycle, from design and development to testing and production."
  (tags: oracle otn oracleuniversity soa governance)

BI11g - New Features - Custom Groups

One of the features I was looking forward to in 11g was the enhanced ability of OBI to interpret multi-dimensional data. ; This is the feature that would help welcome the Essbase users, seamlessly into the OBIEE world as well. ; The real world interpretation of data as hierarchies can be easily represented and analyzed in this new version pretty effectively. In this note I will document the neat feature of creating a custom hierarchy in the presentation layer. Yes!! You heard it right, presentation layer. Using the new grouping mechanism you can custom build groups on the fly and use it for analysis.

Before we look into individual features, below is the welcome screen of OBIEE. It is a very unified, intuitive view of actions. You can expect this same user experience from all products including ODI 11g that have adopted Weblogic as its platform. All the products are integrated with the fusion middleware all the more closely integrated providing a seamless integration in likes of functionality, security, manageability or user experience.

You will see all recently accessed objects are already listed for convenience. Also towards the left of the screen all most likely actions that the user may carry out is listed as well.

The actions can be accessed via the quick access bar or the menu. Again you will see the layout of the menu itself. Actions are grouped together to provide a better UI.

Now that you have decided you are going to create an answers request, the next logical step is to select the Subject area on which to base the request. This is the next menu item that comes up for your input.

This is the Answers creation screen. Again the options like results and prompts are visible as tabs.

Here we see a predefined Hierarchy that is created at design time ie at the repository level.

;

Note the difference in the Pivot table that is been created. It truly represents a multi dimensionality of the incoming data which was not the case in the previous versions. Now that we have created a very simple request, we will proceed to create our own hierarchy.

We will create a custom group called "My Products" and included a set of members from the available set of values from the Products hierarchy

Now you see a new group with its corresponding fact values.

For users who have been working in Smartview, this feature to switch the rows into columns would really make them feel at home.

The Truth About Legacy Technology

We labor under two major misperceptions about technology: Technology from one point in time is better than one further in the past and anything new displaces what came before. When we actively think about these ideas, we may dismiss them. But it's my contention that these are in fact our unconscious, default positions. (These notions would no doubt be scoffed at by medieval Europeans who spent years desperately dreaming of copping a squat inside like the Romans did. But they are operant in the here-and-now.)

As people who live in and among the very latest of technology, I think it's a necessary corrective to examine how we use legacy technologies. So, I asked the most first-adopty people I could find, my fellow ReadWriteWeb staffers. What "old fashioned" technology did they employ every day? Some of them did not respond, as they were immersed in a virtual reality safari or traveling in time. But here's some backtalk from those who did.

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Marshall Kirkpatrick, Co-Editor and VP of Content Development

Fireplace; bicycle; iPhone 3G (just kidding, kinda); shovel instead of tiller and gardening at home instead of Food Inc.; text editor instead of word processor; Wi-Fi instead of wireless card; printed newspapers and magazines because they are cool; books; dirty scowl instead of brain-piercing laser beam

I'm not going to say anything about the chickens.

Adrianne Jeffries, Evening News Writer

The most prominent example that comes to mind is handwriting. Pens, pencils and paper are still often more efficient for me than laptops, computers or mobile devices. Examples: grocery lists, writing while field reporting, writing passive-aggressive notes to roommates, sometimes directions to a place. It's possible to write up to 300 words per minute using shorthand, which I am studying.

So cool I think I'm going to pass out. The world record for shorthand is 350 words per minute and the world record for typing only 212.

Abraham Hyatt, Production Editor

If you go into a hardware store, most hand tools have a sexy, modern version. (Just check out the framing hammers.) But it's frippery added on to something that hasn't changed in hundreds of years. I own my great x 4 grandfather's homemade woodworking plane. It's identical to wooden planes available today. Same goes for hand saws. I have my great x 2 grandfather's hand saw - you could have bought it in a store today. It's technology that has reached a kind of perfection. There's no way to improve on it; it's functionality in its purest form.

That's a powerful idea, the perfection of a technology.

Klint Finley, News Writer

I have a lot of cognitive dissonance about paper vs. digital readers. I wrote a little about it. "The best reason to read books and magazines on paper is because they are not on computers...I did spend the better part of today reading off of screens, and I doubt I'll ever be able to get away from screen reading. But I've got to say, at least at this point in space-time, print is looking better than ever."

Although the functionality of e-readers is undeniable and the possibilities are interesting, today I picked up "Listen to the Warm" at St. Vinnie's and it smelled like...victory.

Audrey Waters, News Writer, Startup and Cloud Channels

The Post-it. Also, I prefer a fountain pen.

If you have a beer with Audrey, you will eventually hear about Post-its.

Sarah Perez, News Writer

I still prefer a bar of soap to those body wash/poof combos. Ha!

If you have a beer with Sarah, you will eventually hear about soap bars. No, I don't know. We live on different oceans. But I like to think when she's hammered she goes on a rant about the "poof" as a sign of the End Times.

Richard MacManus, Founder and Editor-in-Chief

I still use a paper notebook most of the time. I have a paper diary to complement Google Calendar and probably use the former more. I read paper books. I go to the library (it's a big building with books in it).

Always a smart-ass this guy. A building is a building with... Wait, what now?

It should surprise no one that a bunch of people who, whatever else they do or seem to be, are in the final analysis writers, would, when it comes to legacy tech, trend heavily toward pens and paper. Technology is not electronics (although electronics is technology.) Technology is us, doing and it has as much of a foundation in our lives as language, religion, philosophy or music.

That connection is so important, in every part of our lives. A connection to what we do, to another person, to family, to a community, to the great men and women of the past who inspire us. We recognize that technology didn't start with AOL, or with Amiga, or even with the Babbage engine. It started when the first hairbag picked up a rock and broke the end off a coconut or twisted a stick off a sapling and dug out some termites. And it won't end until we do.

Pantheon photo by Andrew Wales
Photo of weirdies by Marshall
Second photo of weirdies by Abraham

Forget Technical Terms - Whoever Gets the Most Developers Wins...Period

In a recent survey by Evans Data, Google gets accolades for its public cloud. IBM gets top marks from developers for its private cloud.

But what do developers want the most? They want the cloud to be simple to use. They want it to be as as easy to get your data in as easy it is to get the data out. And they want it to be secure.

Evans Data survey took a look at the whole gamut of issues related to cloud computing in an annual survey, and its conclusions focus on the dichotomies between private and public clouds.

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Google and IBM share a common denominator. Both apply the basic principles of open source to their cloud computing efforts. That makes it easy for developers to work with the platforms.

This brings up a certain issue we have with the terms used for cloud computing. It does not matter if one cloud is public and another is private. It's about getting the most developers. To do that you need to open up. Period.

ReadWriteWeb views cloud computing as a network of platforms that serve as individual ecosystems. In the Future of the Cloud, we discard the notion of public and private clouds to focus more on emerging platforms.

From the report by Mike Kirkwood:

"As an industry, we are emerging from a phase of infrastructure cloud computing that has been driven by server virtualization and scaling compute. Now we are moving to the next phase of cloud platforms where higher order jobs such as collaboration and communication services are the drivers. In this phase the action will be in how the cloud scales the work done by people, and in how an always-on, always-available infrastructure supports applications that both cut expense and generate revenue.

It's in this phase that we'll discard our previous categorization of IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS, and private, hybrid, and public types of clouds, and instead focus on platforms that extend end-to-end and enable emerging ecosystems. The foundation of the emerging ecosystem is based upon the following.."

Google is attracting developers as well as any cloud provider. The proof is in the API calls it gets. According to Programmable Web, Google is tops in the API billionaire's club.

IBM is developing an ecosystem that includes RightScale and Kaavo for deploying applications and workloads. Navajo Systems provides an additional layer of security. Silanis is used for e-signatures. VMLogix allows for manual, functional, and compatibility testing. AppFirst provides performance monitoring. And SOASTA CloudTest helps deliver load and performance testing.

Forget the technical terms. They will go away. The ideas are what matters, and those ideas will drive the innovation. Ideas are what excites developers.

What also matters are the people: attract developers through what you provide them, not by bandying about terms that in the long run no one really cares about.

But not everyone agrees. We asked on Twitter what people thought of technical terms like IaaS and PaaS.

Eric Delattre said cloud is actually the term that needs to go:

"@alexwilliams @rww the opposite, use IaaS, PaaS, SaaS instead of Cloud!"

Apple Patents Travel, Hotel and Fashion Applications

Three new patent applications which just became public on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) website reveal that Apple is now patenting ideas for mobile applications. Specifically, these patents applications describe iPhone apps that would aid in making travel arrangements, booking hotels and shopping.

The patent applications were uncovered this morning by wireless news site Unwired, which called the development "scary" and equated Apple to a patent troll. If granted, these apps would allow Apple to patent ways in which mobile applications function, including everything from mobile boarding passes to store locator functions.

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Here's what each app would do:

Travel

The travel application would help users make reservations, create an itinerary, view airport guides and information, use mobile boarding passes, check-in to flights remotely, access in-flight services, send and receive automatic arrival notifications and browse and send travel guides and promotions. The app would also have built-in social networking to aid in finding nearby friends or others in the vicinity interested in socializing.

Hotels

The hotel application would allow a user to check in and check out via the app, order hotel services (e.g. making reservations at the spa, ordering or pre-ordering room service, scheduling wake up calls, etc.) book tickets for nearby attractions, schedule reminders and control room settings even when away from the room (think AC, audio/video equipment, etc.). The app could also be used as a universal remote control for the hotel room's TV and video equipment and could suggest programming choices based on stored user profile information. 

Shopping

The mobile shopping application focuses on connecting users to high fashion. The app would send invitations and reminders regarding fashion events, display fashion ads, allow the user to browse through inventory of stores, offer a store locator function, recommend items and check for availability, and display ratings and reviews for stores. Social networking is incorporated into this app, too, allowing friends to provide feedback on fashion items. The app could also provide details on items snapped using the phone's camera.

Why is Apple Competing with Its Developers?

While on the one hand, the above applications sound fantastic and certainly like things we would want to use, the fact that the patents are coming from Apple and not some enterprising startup is somewhat unsettling.

It's not unusual for Apple (or any company) to patent its ideas, but most of Apple's previous patents have been for technology improvements, like using wireless sensors as heart rate monitors, tracking sports in real-time, allowing iPhones to "socially network" with each other when in proximity with one another or modifications to the iPhone's homescreen. Apple has not been in the habit of patenting actual mobile applications.

What does this mean for companies already building applications similar to these? For example, OpenWays, which has already built mobile applications that allow smartphones to work as hotel room keys or Socialight which can be used to build a "virtual hotel concierge" service, among other things? What of the fact that multiple airlines already have their own mobile boarding pass applications? What of the universal remote apps like FLPR, Bobby, L5 and RedEye, to name just a few? And the list could go on and on.

Does Apple want to compete with these developers with its own native apps or does it just want license this technology to others building related services? Are these patents defensive maneuvers to block Google from providing services like these on its Android mobile operating system?

News like this is one of the reasons why so many in the technology industry are so vehemently against the idea of software patents. Foundry Group's managing director Brad Feld, for example, recently called the litigation surrounding patents "a massive tax on and retardant of innovation." Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady agreed, saying "it is not reasonable to expect that the current patent system, nor even one designed to improve or replace it, will ever be able to accurately determine what might be considered legitimately patentable from the overwhelming volume of innovations in software."

Philosophical arguments aside, given Apple's cryptic ways and its behavior when dealing with competition (see: Adobe, AdMob, Flurry Analytics), the idea of Apple venturing into its developers' playing field is one that could greatly affect the innovation in mobile applications for years to come. Discuss

YouTube wants your 15 minutes of fame

Why Facebook Questions Could Be Zuckerberg's Dream Come True

Take one look at the newly launched Facebook Questions feature and it's clear that things are about to change dramatically on the world's largest social network. Take a second look and it's also clear that the feature isn't working very well yet - but it will be fixed and is going to be a very big deal.

A few million people have been given access this afternoon to Facebook Questions, a social Question & Answer feature built under the leadership of Blake Ross, co-creator of the Firefox browser years ago and now an employee at Facebook. Questions may come closer than anything else has yet to founder Mark Zuckerberg's vision of Facebook as a connector of people around the world, a force for empathy and world peace. I think it's going to be a very important and enjoyable part of the site.

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It might be tempting to assume that Facebook Questions is going to end up a cesspool of idiocy, harshness and partisan tyranny of the majority. But look at it this way: The most successful social software company in the history of the world hired the creator of the Firefox browser who worked for months to build an effective Q&A service and you think it's going to turn into a YouTube dumb-fest? That's not the outcome I'd bet my money on.

Facebook as Empathy Engine

Why do people listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio? Because they are idiots, right? Wrong, according to Grant Fisher, a grad student at St. Mary's University School of Law in Texas. Fisher offered a lengthy, intelligent, insightful and sympathetic answer to that question on Facebook today and his answer has been voted to the top of the question's page. Fisher says people listen to Limbaugh because he has decades of experience researching politics, because he articulates to conservatives what (he believes) liberals are thinking and to liberals what (some) conservatives are thinking and because many people believe he has a good track record of predicting what's going to happen in politics. And because he's entertaining.

That's a good, informative answer and one that has already changed my shallow thinking about Rush Limbaugh fans. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I would pass judgement on a huge group of people so thoughtlessly and callously, but I know I'm not alone. And neither is Fisher alone in offering a high-quality answer to a controversial question on Facebook.

There are going to be some very interesting questions and answers about peace in the Middle East, the Pro Life vs Pro Choice debate, drug policy, race, gender, the environment - you name it.

Because Facebook Questions are open to the whole world and because answers are voted on, we're going to learn a whole lot about other peoples' perspectives. Most of the Facebook newsfeed is filled with Farmville updates, baby pictures and misspelled drunken rambling. That will never bring me closer to the personal thoughts of a woman in Indonesia, a young boy in Egypt or a Canadian Mounty who rides through the snow-covered hills on a horse all day, thinking about why on earth people listen to Rush Limbaugh on the radio. But the public, voted-on Questions feature will.

Early users of the service are offering long, thoughtful answers. That will change in time, but answers that aren't helpful will not be voted up. Will obnoxious partisan answers be voted to the top in a tyranny of the majority? Even if such an answer were to be at the top, the next one below it would likely be more informative, empathetic and useful. Facebook engineer Beau Hartshorne has also said on the site that users will be demoted if they ask questions that are really assertions. There will be individual Questions that get nothing but terrible answers - but in aggregate, due to the scale of the humanity doing the voting, I think the Questions experience will be on balance strong.

I think we're going to see some really good discussions on Facebook. These conversations aren't going to be like YouTube. They aren't going to be like Wikipedia. They aren't going to be like Yahoo Answers, with millions of questions asked again and again, with no legacy knowledge retained and developed over time. They are going to be like Stack Overflow, and those are some really good conversations.

People will have their hearts and minds changed about controversial matters after using a well-designed social Q&A feature on a sprawling world-wide social network like Facebook. This will be a net win for the human experience. I don't think that's an exaggeration at all.

I think millions of people will end up spending hours browsing through Facebook Questions, learning things. I think it's going to be great. As soon as they fix it and make it work better.

Turn-key, Customizable WordPress Hosting & Maintenance Now Offered by WP Engine

A small team of high-profile developers are unveiling its new service for hosting customizable but automatically maintained WordPress publishing software installs tonight. WP Engine seeks to serve what they believe is a large market: businesses that need more customizability than WordPress.com hosted accounts offer at low-end prices but more ease of use and scalability support than the millions of WordPress.org users get running open source installs on their own or rented servers.

For $50 a month, the service will offer premium support, automatic security upgrades, recommended plug-in curation and some original software. Scalability durring traffic spikes is one of the company's biggest sales propositions.

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The WP Engine team includes Jason Cohen, co-host of the excellant startup resource site Answers.OnStartups, Austin-based journeyman developer Cullen Wilson and Aaron Brazell (Technosailor), author of the WordPress Bible and a geek with PHP under his nails. The company is working with Ben Metcalfe, a former BBC engineer well-known in Silicon Valley for being sharp-whited and plainspoken, as an advisor.

The service begins sending out invites tonight. Whether there is in fact such a large potential market ready to pay $50 per month that an invite system is needed remains to be seen. There may very well be. The company says that hip, load sensitive startups InfoChimps and Balsamiq are already using its service to host their blogs.

Metcalfe says he believes there is a world full of real estate and law firm offices that use WordPress for their small company sites but are not sufficiently served by WordPress.com or by expensive contractors hired to do spot programming jobs as necessary. See also competitor Page.ly.

Memcached: What is it and what does it do?

4chan is Hiring - Unless It's a Prank

Unless it's an elaborate and pointless prank - and come on, how likely is that? - 4chan is hiring. To be more specific, a 4chan spin-off, called Canvas, is hiring for several New York-based technical positions.

Canvas has yet to be publicly defined, but the jobs page on the the White Album-ish placeholder site hints at it in describing the type of people they're looking for.

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"Ideal candidates are heavy users of online communities who want to invent new and better ways for people to hang out and collaborate online. We're working on a product that takes forums and re-imagines them for an era of increasingly sophisticated users and browsers."

Specifically, they are looking for a "Frontend developer/designer" and a "Tech lead - Backend developer/operations."

4chan was started in 2003 by the then-15 year old Christopher Poole, as a place to talk and post about Japanese anime. But in the intervening years it's become the largest image-based bulletin board in the U.S. It also launched such celebrated and decried memes like Rickrolling and lolcats. (If you by any chance don't know what those things are, don't look them up. You'll start up another wave and that will only encourage them.)

Given the radically anonymous nature of the site - anyone can post under any, or no, name - and the mischievousness of its users (who tried to exile teen singer Justin Bieber to North Korea), the roll-out of a funded website might seem out of character. But people grow up, perhaps. That's what my mommy tells me anyway. And venture capitalist Andreesen Horowitz must think so, as they were big investors in the $625,000 the startup's raised, according to WebNewser.

Their rigorous interview process includes you sending them your "links to public projects, your GitHub, open source contributions, whatever you have." (I've sent them a mannequin filled with stoat paste and a recording of my harmonica interp of Satie's "Gymnopedies." I presume that's what they're looking for.) After that, there's probably a fair bit of ID checking and some sort of obstacle course along with a variant of the Spanish Prisoner.

I don't know. What do you want? I'm old. You kids get off my lawn.

Forking PHP!

One place where people seem to stumble with PHP is with long running PHP processes or parallel processing. The pcntl extension gives you the ability to fork PHP processes and run lots of children like many other unix daemons might. We use this for various things. Most notably, we use it run Gearman worker processes. While at the OReilly Open Sourc Convention in 2009, we were asked about how we pulled this off. So, we are releasing the two scripts that handle the forking and some instructions on how we use them.

This is not a detailed post about long running PHP scripts. ; Maybe I can get to the dos and don'ts of that another time. ; But, these are the scripts we use to manage long running processes. ; They work great for us on Linux. ; They will not run on Windows at all. ; We also never had any trouble running them on Mac OS X.

The first script, prefork.php, is for forking a given function from a given file and running n children that will execute that function. There can be a startup function that is run before any forking begins and a shutdown function to run when all the children have died.

The second script, prefork_class.php, uses a class with defined methods instead of relying on the command line for function names. This script has the added benefit of having functions that can be run just before each fork and after each fork. This allows the parent process to farm work out to each child by changing the variables that will be present when the child starts up. This is the script we use for managing our Gearman workers. We have a class that controls how many workers are started and what functions they provide. I may release a generic class that does that soon. Right now it is tied to our code library structure pretty tightly.

We have also included two examples. They are simple, but do work to show you how the scripts work.

You can download the code from the dealnews.com developers' page.

UPDATE: I have released a Gearman Worker Manager on Github.

RIM Buys BlackPad.com, Readies New BlackBerry Slider - But Can It Still Compete?

MobileCrunch reports that Research in Motion has purchased the domain name blackpad.com, fueling speculation that RIM's long rumored enterprise tablet will be called the BlackPad. Others suggest it is merely a codename. One commenter at MobileCrunch notes the domain name was on sale at BuyDomains for $1,788. The domain blackpad.com doesn't revolve to any address at this time.

Meanwhile, Reuters reports that RIM is likely to announce the launch of the BlackBerry Torch 9800, a device RIM hopes will compete with the iPhone, at an event with AT&T on Tuesday New York City.

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BlackBerry Cool provides a scan of an invitation to the event:

Engadget released images of the 9800 in June. The new device will run the BlackBerry6 OS we covered here previously.

The 9800 is expected to be released exclusively by AT&T - an odd move for a device competing with the iPhone, considering the the iPhone's exclusivity to AT&T has long been considered a major detriment to Apple's device. However, Verizon, RIM's partner for its previous iPhone competitor,The Storm, has hitched its wagon to the success of Android. The Storm's sales were reportedly lackluster. Reuters, citing RIM's declining market share, this week suggested the end of the BlackBerry era may be upon us.

Even in the area of enterprise security, where RIM has dominated Apple and Google, RIM is slipping in influence. Both companies have rolled out improved security features in recent months, and enterprises are accepting the devices. In an interview with InfoWorld, Intel CIO Diane Bryant says there are 9,000 employee-owned phones now in use at Intel, and the vast majority of them are iPhones.

The BlackBerry tablet, called BlackPad or not, will like enter a competitive enterprise marketplace. The iPad already had a respectable showing in the enterprise, and Cisco and HP have both announced enterprise-centric tablets.

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links for 2010-07-28

• Enabling Shadow IT v Shredding the Edge | CTO Blog | Capgemini | Consulting, Technology, Outsourcing
  (tags: ping.fm)
• Enterprise Software Development with Java: Oracle ACE and ACED at DOAG Conference and Exhebition 2010
  (tags: ping.fm)
• Angus Graham: AutoVue User Acceptance Testing
  "The concept is simple," says Graham. "Set up a test environment which is identical in architecture to the production environment, install your software, configure it, and then get actual users to test it with real data the same way they would use the system in real life."
  (tags: oracle otn ecm)
• Jake Kuramato: Sweet Enhancements to the WebCenter Chrome Extension
  "The extension still posts to WebCenter and shows you your activity stream, which is pretty sweet in and of itself, but it also does browser capture, markup and upload to WebCenter UCM," says Jake.?
  (tags: oracle otn webcenter enterprise2.0)
• Eric A. Stephens: Documenting Enterprise Architecture - IEEE 1471
  "I have consistently advocated for certain principles in documentation. "The first is: one diagram is insufficient to fully describe an architecture," says Eric. "Second, a picture alone is insufficient."
  (tags: oracle otn enterprisearchitecture entarch)
• Your Video Could Win You a Free Oracle OpenWorld or JavaOne and Oracle Develop Full Conference Pass
  Put together a short video to convince your peers why you should get a FREE conference pass to Oracle OpenWorld, JavaOne, or Oracle Develop. Do you give good sessions? Or are you a diehard OTN Night partygoer? Click the link for details.?
  (tags: OOW10 javaone oracledevelop)
• What Should We Call Enterprise Architecture? - ebizQ Forum
  Great community discussion on a hot topic.?
  (tags: enterprisearchitecture communication governance)

Google Docs Adds Translation for 53 Languages

From Wikipedia articles to visual recognition and translation with Google Goggles, Google is constantly working to rebuild the Tower of Babel and enable frictionless multi-lingual communication.

Its latest effort brings translation to Google Docs, making translation even simpler.

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Rather than cutting and pasting text from Google Docs into Google Translate, users now can translate their documents within the editor into any one of 53 languages. The translation is quick and opens the translated in a new tab, which offers to replace the original document or copy the translation into a new document.

Amusingly, Google-created browser Chrome immediately offered to translate the doc back into another language, recognizing that much of the text was not in the default English. Auto-translation became a part of Chrome last March and helps to illustrate just how integrated translation is becoming at Google.

At this rate, it's becoming more and more believable that Google will offer real-time translation on mobile phones within a few years' time.

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??????????????????Premier Support?????????????????????????????Premier Support??????????Premier Support?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????'????????

2010/08/31??'??????????BEA?????????????

• BEA AquaLogic Service Bus 2.0 / 2.1 / 2.5 / 2.6
• BEA AquaLogic Service Registry 2.1 / 2.1.1

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E-Readers Bring The World's Library to Rural Africa

Worldreader.org has just finished a proof of concept for e-reader use in the African country of Ghana. Verdict? Yeah, it works. It helps increase literacy. So they're going to do a lot more of it.

"Books to All" is the motto of this non-profit spearheaded by David Risher, who led Amazon's Product Development for five years.

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In March, Worldreader finished their Phase 1 trial, using 20 Kindle-brand e-readers in the village of Ayenyah, Ghana. Results were good.

"During this trial, we found that the Kindle e-reader and digital books helped new readers learn to read, got the kids reading more, and gave access to hundreds of thousands of books, in less time and at lower cost than printed books."

Project Gutenberg alone offers 30,000 free e-book titles. So, with each e-reader the group brings to a student, it may well be justified in claiming it also brings that student "the world's library."

The highly wired nature of Africa (which has much less in the way of the infrastructure that includes landlines) mean e-readers can connect. The wireless telephony that characterizes much of the content means, the group discovered, that students who've never used a computer can nonetheless quickly master the e-reader.

"The infrastructure already in place for mobile phones supports e-readers: Low-power Kindles successfully charged from solar-powered car batteries in an hour, we were able to download books via the satellite internet link in 45 seconds, and there was cell phone coverage in the village."

Worldreader.org's Susan Moody Prieto wrote to tell us the organization's next steps.

"We have approval from the Ghana Ministry of Education to do a larger trial in October (336 Kindles) in 4 schools. We will be measuring the results very closely: seeing how e-readers affect reading habits and ultimately to what degree they can improve literacy. And then we will roll out on a larger scale from then on: moving into more countries in Africa and Latin America. We are also working with local publishers to digitize books that otherwise would get left behind as more books go digital."

She said the organization, despite their connection to Amazon, is "e-reader agnostic...we are ultimately looking for the best e-reader to bring books into the developing world (and) will be actively working with manufacturers to do so."

What about that? Any employees of Apple, Borders or B&N reading this? You know what to do.

You can download the full 39-page report on the first phase of Worldreader.org's Ghana project here.

When Startups Grow Out of the Cloud

Cloud computing has been a boon to tech startups, allowing them to build, launch and scale without substantial up-front investment in hardware. But at what point does the moving from the cloud to a data center make more sense - for both performance and cost?

Facebook announced plans earlier this year to build a custom data center in Prineville, Oregon, and Twitter announced last week that it plans to build one near Salt Lake City, Utah. And web app maker 37Signals isn't building its own data center, but it did reveal last week that it will move its infrastructure from Rackspace hosting to a colocation space in a Chicago data center.

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As Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook's VP of Technical Operations said at last month's Structure 2010 conference, "For a consumer web site starting today, I would absolutely run on the cloud. It allows you to focus on building your product. But if you have 10 million users, that's a pretty big check I'm writing to someone else. How much control do I have?"

Data Centers Give More Flexibility, More Control?

37Signals Operations Manager Mark Imbriaco explains the growth of 37Signals as such: since moving to the cloud four years ago, "we've grown from around 15 physical machines to a mixture of around 150 physical and virtual machines. We've also grown from having less than 1TB of data to on the order of 80TB of data today. Our needs have evolved a great deal as we've grown and we reached the point where it made sense for us to acquire our own hardware and manage our own datacenter infrastructure. The amount of flexibility that we have with our own environment makes it much easier for us to use some specialized equipment that meets our needs better than the solutions that Rackspace generally supports."

The desire for greater flexibility and control was also given by Twitter as rationale for its new data center. According to Twitter's Engineering Blog, "Twitter will have full control over network and systems configuration, with a much larger footprint in a building designed specifically around our unique power and cooling needs. Twitter will be able to define and manage to a finer grained SLA on the service as we are managing and monitoring at all layers. The data center will house a mixed-vendor environment for servers running open source OS and applications."

Implication for the Cloud

It isn't surprising that rapidly growing companies like Twitter and Facebook have reached a point where it pencils out to have their own data center. But what are the implications for cloud computing - something that promises infinite scalability?

And more importantly perhaps, the justifications given by Twitter and 37Signals for building a data center or moving to a colocation facility are less about cost and performance than they are about sufficient controls. Are public cloud providers doing enough to offer their enterprise customers with the flexibility and control they want?

Facebook Gives Out Free Facebook Credits to Grease the System

Facebook has continued ramping up its Facebook Credits by taking a tried and true approach - giving some users a little taste to get them wanting more.

Facebook has been randomly giving users anywhere from 10 to 25 free Facebook Credits over recent weeks, a move the company hinted at during its f8 developer conference in April.

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Facebook acknowledges its credit giveaway on the site, saying "If you see a credit balance and didn't buy your own credits, then you likely received free credits directly from Facebook as a gift." An update to its Facebook Credits page shows that the company is launching further initiatives this week to push its credits system:

Besides getting Facebook Credits in your favorite apps, do you know that there are also other ways to get them? Thanks to Plastic Jungle, Rixty, Inc., Booyah, and Games.com, get Credits by exchanging gift cards, turning in spare change, checking into locations, and entering a sweepstake. This week, be on the lookout as we feature these other ways..

Giving away small amounts of virtual currency, or "seeding", is a common practice when it comes to virtual economies and can get users comfortable with spending and using that currency. With the site shutting down its virtual "Gift Shop", credits are currently only good for playing games and making in-game purchases. Is Facebook attempting makes its users comfortable spending credits on games or, as we've posited before, is it testing the waters on expanding its credits program into other arenas, such as apps and even real-world goods?

As Chris Birk wrote for ReadWriteWeb last week, "Facebook is standing at the foot of a virtual cash mountain" and "a network-wide rollout of the virtual currency application would streamline transactions online and, in effect, pave the path to the world's first global currency." With Facebook's international population exploding but banner advertising not providing a "worthwhile return on investment internationally", credits are a way to monetize the 70% of Facebook's total user base that lives outside of the U.S.

The real question is, what would you feel comfortable spending your Facebook Credits on? A single Facebook Credit, at $1.99 for 20, comes out to just under 10 cents each. Facebook takes a 30% bite out of each transaction and has said that "users paying with Facebook Credits are significantly more likely to complete a purchase than the average Facebook user." Maybe this is because the transaction is easier, but perhaps it is also because of the mental disconnect between a virtual currency and real-world currency. Giving away credits may be a good way to educate users and reinforce the idea that credits aren't actually worth anything in the real world, making them that much easier to spend.

As for my 20 free credits, they're likely to sit there, unspent, until Facebook comes up with something other than virtual, in-game goods that I can spend them on.

Autoloading for fun and profit

Wordcraft 0.10 available

New Google Chrome Extension Will Translate Your Tweets and Facebook Updates

The social web is increasingly multilingual. About half the updates on Twitter are in a language other than English, according to a study released in February. Facebook has been translated into more than 50 languages for its 500 million users are all over the world. The day when English is no longer the dominant language on social networks may not be far off.

Social Translate is a new open source extension for Google's Chrome browser that translates updates on social networking sites into your native language using Google Translate.

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You can choose between "reliable," which appears to attempt fewer translations, or "aggressive," which is less accurate but attempts to guess at more words.

Of course, Google Translate's ability is limited, and it seems to extract less meaning when the sentences are short.

A tweet from one of the top users in Beijing translated from Chinese to English using Social Translate.

Social Translate is a useful and relevant idea for a web that is increasingly composed of conversations. The extension has some shortcomings and a few bugs, judging by a quick test and its page on Google Code.

It detects languages correctly on Twitter and translates acceptably (except for the fact that Google Translate often turns up total nonsense), letting users skip the Google Translate prompt that appears when you navigate to a site in a foreign language. If your first language is English but you're also fluent in Spanish, you can tell Social Translate to display Spanish tweets but translate any other language to English.

On Facebook, the extension is measurably less useful. It only translates status updates as they appear in your News Feed - not in comments on updates, in profiles or on users' walls.

It appears the two developers, Andrew Swerdlow and Nav Jagpal, are still working out the kinks with this extension. I could not get the extension to work for MySpace or Google Buzz, although the developers intend for it to work for those services.

Update: Just got an email from Swerdlow, who says they are testing a build that works with Buzz and hope to ramp up on some of the other big sites over the next few months. If you download Social Translate, you can test it by going to Swerdlow's multilingual Twitter page, http://twitter.com/AndroidX.

Can Google Solve the Cloud Security Problem for Enterprises?

Last week we wrote about Google's long term strategy to win over enterprise customers. But MarketWatch reported Friday on a short-term setback for Google enterprise ambitions: the company missed the deadline to deploy Google Apps to Los Angeles municipal employees. The delay revolves around security, that ever-present cloud computing concern. In response, Google announced Google Apps for Government today. Will Google be able to assuage enterprise concerns over cloud security?

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Google's trouble in LA began when the Los Angles Police Department complained that Google had not demonstrated compliance with security requirements such as segregation of City of Los Angles data from other data maintained by Google and background checks for Google employees with access to city data. Google and its implementation partner Computer Sciences Corp agreed to pay the costs of the delay, which could be up to $415,000. But the greater concern for both Google, and the cloud computing business writ large, is the damage the delays could do to government and enterprise adoption of cloud computing services. Hence: Google Apps for Government.

Google has acquired Federal Information Security Management Act certification will segregate government data on servers located in the US. Google Apps also rolled out a couple additional security features recently: user policy management and mobile security policies. The new security features could be connected to Google's ongoing difficulties in LA.

Google seems confident that its new service will win over government contracts, and satisfy the City of Los Angles's requirements. CNET reports Google's enterprise president Dave Girouard as saying "We'd love to rolled out to [sic] 50 smaller cities ahead of LA...but in the end, LA will be a great success for the city, and for Google." But first Los Angles Police Department will have to sign off on Google Apps for Government.

The real test, however, for Google Apps for Government, is whether it can win the contract to provide cloud based e-mail for the General Services Administration - the same agency that issued Google its FISMA certification. The Wall Street Journal reported today that Microsoft and Google are locked in a bidding war for the contract. According to the Wall Street Journal, over 90% of federal government uses Microsoft Exchange, so landing the GSA would be a big win for Google.

There's no word yet on whether Google will offer data segregation services to private enterprises as well, but those types of assurances would probably go a long way towards improving trust in cloud computing. Other companies, such as Trend Micro, are working on creating ways for enterprises to encrypt data before places it in cloud service providers hands - but it's not clear that a solution like that would work well in conjunction with Google Apps.

Many enterprises wanting to take advantage of virtualization and web-based productivity applications have opted for on-premise "private cloud" solutions. That's the approach Google and Microsoft's lesser known rival Zoho has offered for some large clients such as GE. However, Zoho's Raju Vegesnatold told us by e-mail:

We believe cloud applications will go bottom up - this means, smaller companies will adopt cloud apps first and eventually move to the enterprise. This is going to be an evolution/transition and is going to take some time. While this happens, the applications, security, confidence etc will evolve and improve. Note that Salesforce.com has been selling CRM for 10 years now (started with SMBs too), but only recently it is being adopted at the enterprise level.

Vegesnatold may be right: according to report released last week by SPI Research, 46% of professional services providers now prefer SaaS solutions to on-premise solutions - up six percent from a survey conducted just six months before. For the time being, SMBs will lead the way for cloud computing. But as security assurances improves, or fiscal realities necessitate, the enterprise will follow into the cloud.

Image credit: Bichuas (E. Carton)

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????Welcome Sun !???'?????Java?Oracle Solaris?ORACLE MASTER?3?????????????????????????'???????Java?Oracle Solaris??'??'?????ORACLE MASTER?????ORACLE MASTER?????????Sun??????Welcome???

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Who cares about encryption & why hard disk cryptography is only part of the solution...

One of my favourite sources of IT news and information is The Register, a UK based IT news related website that is written with style and often makes what can be a dull subject of IT, compelling reading.

I just read an article by Jon Collins which details results of a recent poll asking about general use of encryption and what people thought were the main areas where cryptography should be used to protect sensitive information. Run by research company Freeform Dynamics, Jon points out that their polls typically attract those interested in the subject matter, so its safe to say my Mum wasn't answering the questions.

The first analysis from the article looks at the answers to "Which of the following drivers are likely to influence your organisation when it comes to requirements for encrypting data?" Pretty obvious results with compliance in first place, then protecting the storage of confidential information and protecting information due to an increasingly mobile workforce.

No surprises here, more and more regulatory controls specify that credit card data, patient information, etc needs to be encrypted. Companies with large amounts of sensitive information, such as financial data, intellectual property and trade secrets need to protect the storage of that data and also when it's used on a mobile device, typically a laptop.

However when the poll asked what the most important areas of encryption were, the results revealed concerns of the modern, mobile workplace. The question was "In an ideal world, which of the following do you think should be encrypted and to what degree?"

So the top three ideal-world targets for encrypting everything are, in order:

• Data stored on notebooks used by mobile workers
  
• Data stored on smartphones and other portable/handheld devices
  
• Data stored on desktops/notebooks used in home locations
  

Combine this with the following quote from Jon's article... "The executive who found himself personally responsible for a data breach when his laptop was stolen from his house may have been taken by surprise, as there is a lingering mindset that security is a central infrastructure thing. But rules and regs like PCI are not fussy about which particular part of the IT infrastructure is involved, be it a SAN in the data centre, or an SD card in a phone. It's all just IT."

Information rights management is a perfect solution for these encryption challenges. But it goes beyond just the mobile or home use, IRM uses encryption at the document or email level. So no matter where the information is stored, it's always encrypted. Another really nice feature of IRM is that even when the content is in USE, it is protected. So the file on the hard disk, the file being sent over the network and the file in your Word/Excel/PowerPoint/Adobe Reader/Internet Explorer etc is ALWAYS secured with IRM.

Unfortunately the article ends with some not so good news. The poll finds that one of the main reasons not to encrypt information on notebooks, removable devices (DVD's, CD's, USB drives etc) is the "practicalities around implementation" and "challenges with key management". So people view that deploying an encryption solution for mobile devices is difficult. Yet IRM is actually pretty easy to deploy and use and Oracle IRM has excellent key management.

Finally, and this is the real killer for me, is Jon's closing message, "Meanwhile, the message to end-users is, if you haven't already encrypted your laptop data, you'd best get on with it - or at least ask your IT department how to do it". I would be that most IT departments are going to end up looking at hard disk encryption to secure documents stored on mobile devices. Yet this really doesn't solve the greatest risk.

The advantage of hard disk encryption is it protect every file stored on it, unlike IRM which applies encryption to a limited set of supported file formats. However, that is also one of its main weaknesses... hard disk encryption ONLY protects the information whilst it is stored on the disk. It doesn't do anything to protect against the following challenges.

• Research shows that data loss incidents are usually by accident and by people outside your organization. So basically it's the supplier you sent your trade secret document to that stores it on an unencrypted USB key which gets lost on train. Encrypting your employee hard disks doesn't get close to solving that problem.
• Hard disk encryption only protects the content whilst it is stored on the disk. As soon as that content is attached to an email, copied to a USB key or even just opened in Word, it now exists in an decrypted state. IRM is persistent in its security because the cryptography is applied at the document level and is combined with tight application integration to ensure that you can't even copy and paste sensitive data from a document into a non-encrypted world.

So whilst IRM is not the be all and end all of information security, combined with technologies like DLP, hard disk encryption, network encryption etc, it brings a huge difference in the reduction of the risk and exposure of an organization to losing control of their most sensitive information.

Google Apps for Government Addresses Cloud Security Concerns

The LA Times reported over the weekend that Google had missed its deadline for implementing a the city's new email system, in part because it had not fully responded to some of the LA Police Department's security concerns.

But Google announced this morning that it was introducing a new edition of Google Apps, Google Apps for Government, an indication that Google is still committed to making inroads into enterprise, schools, and now government.

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Google Apps boasts Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) certification from the U.S. Government - the first suite of cloud computing applications to receive it. The FISMA law applies to all systems utilized by federal government agencies, and Google's accreditation means that the federal government has reviewed Google's security controls. "This review," says Google in the blog post announcing the Apps for Government edition, "makes it easier for federal agencies to compare our security features to those of their existing systems; most agencies we have worked with have found that Google Apps provides at least equivalent, if not better, security than they have today. This means government customers can move to the cloud with confidence."

Google Apps for Government stores Gmail and Calendar data in a separate storage system housed state-side, one designed exclusively for Google's government contractors. Google Apps for Government is available to any federal, state or local government in the U.S., and according to Google "should give governments an even stronger case for making the move to the cloud."

Whether or not it's a strong enough case for the Los Angeles Police Department, and other skeptics, remains to be seen.

Why can't you give Kindle books as gifts?

Life in a Day - on YouTube

If you found those "Day in a Life" books fascinating, you may find YouTube's latest experiment, Life in a Day, equally interesting. If on the other hand, you found them disappointingly insipid, this may not be your bag.

Life in a Day is being marketed as a "user-generated feature film shot in a single day." The creators are asking people around the world to upload their quotidian videos to a YouTube channel. The director, Kevin MacDonald ("The Last King of Scotland"), will cut it together.

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Produced by Ridley Scott, the director of "Black Hawk Down," "Gladiator" and "Blade Runner," the film is also planning to fold in video from cameras given to people (including NGO workers) in "remote" places. Presumably, all the video is supposed to have been shot on July 24. However, as a clock on the YouTube Channel indicates, contributors have until the end of the month to upload that video.

Whose life is it anyway?

One of the key issues with a project like this is how honest the filmmakers are about how much of their sensibilities and values inflect the project. The other is, simply put, how interesting it will be as a film.

To these issues should probably be added the effect Google will have on the how and why of the film. Google, which owns YouTube, is deeply involved with its production. It's difficult to say how hands-off a company when it has an opportunity to leave its fingerprints on a Ridley Scott movie. Merely by spearheading it and influencing its manner of gathering and distribution it's already done a great deal of that.

No, but seriously. A day in whose life?

The film has been pre-accepted into the Sundance Film Festival. It has been reported that the contributors whose videos are used will not be paid, but the film will not be sold to a studio either. Instead, it will be available for viewing on YouTube. 20 contributors will be brought to the Sundance premiere, apparently.

Frankly, it's difficult to imagine how the film is going to capture an average day in anyone's life, much less the whole of a day for everyone. Among the many elements that will inform the shape of the finished product are the following.

• It's being produced by an action movie director
• Contributors are required to abide by YouTube's TOS
• The film has been pre-approved by one of the world's leading money factories for new movies
• It looks like it will be larded with self-consciously authentic video from remote places*

It seems more likely that a film about a specific time and definitely place by a single filmmaker might have a better chance of universality than a documentary about everyone by anyone.

But we will, quite literally, see about that.

*Just for the record: I'm reasonably certain that Namibia doesn't seem remote to the folks in Windhoek. And G-d protect us from a Dreadlock J. Collegestudent's paternalistic videos of Haiti or Cornelius Jamcrumpet III's fearless footage of himself hugging the Mashantucket Pequots!

Introducing the ADF Developers Conference

Are you interested in a conference dedicated to Oracle ADF?

How about 5 days where at every time slot you can find at least one ADF session?
Wouldn't it be great if there were both basic level sessions for newbies as well as deep dive sessions for experts? How about some hands-on labs on specific topics?
What if we throw in a couple of keynotes from relevant senior managers in Oracle? And what if you'll be able to see sessions from all the ADF Oracle ACEs and participate in the ADF Enterprise Methodology Group live discussion? What if you could meet a JDeveloper Product Manager or an ADF book author and ask your question?

Would you be interested? Will you be able to convince your manager that this is the conference you need to go to?

Well, good news, this conference is here.

it's Oracle Develop!

Yes, all of the above is true for this year's conference.
Last time I counted there were over 30 sessions directly related to JDeveloper and ADF at Oracle Develop and OOW.
They spend the range from the introductory level with things like "Introduction to ADF Faces", or "Mobile development with ADF" to advance sessions like "How to Debug Oracle Application Development Framework Applications", "Classic Mistakes with Oracle Application Development Framework Internal APIs ", "Web-Service-Based Oracle ADF Business Components ", and more.

While some session are more high level, there are a lot of sessions that bring you the experience of others using ADF, tips and tricks sessions, sessions dedicated to specific parts of ADF (ADF DI, MDS, Skinning).
examples include: "Developing Large Oracle Application Development Framework 11g Applications", "Load-Testing Your Web Applications: Oracle JDeveloper and More", "Mastering Customization and Personalization in Oracle ADF and Oracle WebCenter"
,"Oracle WebLogic Server Application Security Implementation in Oracle JDeveloper"

Think you already know all of that there is to know about ADF, then you get a chance to expand your knowledge about the other parts of the Oracle Fusion Middleware - SOA Suite, WebCenter, WebLogic etc.
And for the same price you also get access to all the sessions at JavaOne to learn about what's coming up in the Java space.
Add to this some great networking opportunities, great parties (Steve Miller Band, Black Eyed Peas and more).

There is so much more, just go to the content catalog and search for ADF or JDeveloper and you'll see.

Tthis is truly the one event you should be attending if you are interested in expanding your knowledge of ADF and JDeveloper.

Don't miss it.

Les Solutions de PLM Pour Une Économie Verte?

Les enterprises veulent s'atteler aux eco-initiatives. Mais comment fait-on? Quel rôle a les solutions de la gestion du cycle de vie des produits (PLM) avec une initiative verte?

En savoir plus sur ce sujet, lisez cet article.

DevOps is the only way it has ever made sense

Brian Moon has been working with the LAMP platform since before it was called LAMP.

Shopping Conversations

Blippy is an interesting concept but I found the stream of purchases, well, a little mind-numbing. Jane bought this and Joe bought that. It was helpful to see what iPhone apps people were buying, but there are better ways to get that sort of information (App Store Top 25 for example).

In most cases social media should make everyday social interactions more efficient. I don't yell over the fence to my neighbors every time I watch a Netflix movie, so having Blippy automate that process doesn't do much for me.

ShopSocially, on the other hand, seems to better approximate real-world conversation. What do people do around the water-cooler from a shopping perspective? They talk about the important purchases they've made, usually explaining their reasoning and outcome. Then they ask others for opinions on purchases they are contemplating. ShopSocially makes both of those processes, sharing and asking, more efficient through the use of social networks.

I spoke with Jai Rawat about his new company, his fourth start-up, and I think he's on the right path. The last thing I want to do is join another network, but ShopSocially is already linked to Facebook and Twitter so those social networks can be leveraged.

And I think this could complement product comments on websites. After posting a comment, a button could allow the reviewer to push to ShopSocially, which may in turn push the comment to Facebook and/or Twitter. Retailers get the same benefits they've always gotten from these types of social interactions. When they take care of the customer, the customer tells their friends -- only with today's technology more people are reached in less time.

What Oracle Develop Session will you Schedule First?

Starbucks Expanding Mobile Payment Program to More Stores

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced this week that the Seattle-based coffee chain would soon be expanding its mobile payment program to more stores over the coming months. Launched in September of last year, Starbucks users with iPhones could pay for their purchases via their mobile device using a special Starbucks Card mobile application. The app was initially accepted at just 16 Seattle and Bay Area stores which were taking part in the pilot program. In March 2010, the company expanded the mobile program to include 1,000 Target stores across the U.S.

Now, Starbucks plans to expand it yet again. "We know believe that offering mobile payment and mobile gifting capabilities will result in a more efficient in-store experience," said Schultz.

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After entering in a Starbucks card number in the application, the Starbucks Card app displays a barcode which can then be shown at checkout in lieu of handing over a physical card to be swiped. The app also allows customers to check their card's balance, view transactions and reload the card with new funds.

Currently, the mobile payment aspect to the application works at 16 select stores in Cupertino, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, San Jose and Seattle where the feature has been in testing in addition to all Target locations in the U.S.

Based on the program's "early success" and user feedback which Schultz describes as "positive," the company is now committed to expanding the program in the months ahead. According to Schultz, not only does the mobile app make for a more efficient in-store experience for Starbucks customers, it will also provide the company with a significant competitive advantage and help further differentiate it from its competitors.

While we at ReadWriteWeb are certainly fans of mobile technology, it will be interesting to watch as this sort of mobile payment system takes hold outside of the very tech-savvy enclaves where it has been initially tested. Will mainstream users adopt this system in large numbers? Will it really be more efficient or will you be stuck in line behind folks fiddling with their phones? And where, by golly, is the Android version?

Bing ads are such bull crap

How big is the sun?

Google

Yahoo

Bing

iPhone 4 Antenna Issues? There's a Free Bumper App for That

Apple has just released a new mobile application for owners of iPhone 4 devices who are affected by the widely-reported antenna issues with the newly redesigned handsets. The app, called the iPhone 4 Case Program, will allow qualified customers to apply for a free rubber bumper case directly from their phone.

In a press conference last week, Apple CEO Steve Jobs admitted to the problems with the iPhone 4, which now sports an antenna wrapped around the outside of the handset itself. The exec said Apple knew that such a design would cause the bars to drop a bit when the phone was gripped in a certain way, but didn't think it would be a big problem because all smartphones have this issue.

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iPhone 4 is Not Perfect!

Although Jobs' mea culpa involved demonstrating how other smartphones are also affected by so-called "death grip" issues (special ways of holding a device that reduce its signal strength), it's clear that consumers - and perhaps Apple itself - hold Apple to a higher standard. After Consumer Reports boldly stated it could not recommend the iPhone 4 to customers, the "antennagate" problem crossed the chasm from being fodder for technology blogs to an issue mainstream consumers began to care about in earnest.

During the press conference, Jobs promised that unhappy iPhone 4 owners would be provided with free bumpers - rubber outer casings that are being sold by Apple (for the first time ever) at $30 apiece. If Apple thought that the antenna issues would work in its favor as a way to earn additional revenue by marking up rubber cases that couldn't be more than a couple dollars at most to manufacture, it was sorely mistaken. The cases will now have to be written off as a loss.

Free Bumpers for Everyone (for a Limited Time)

Yesterday, Apple began processing refunds for customers who purchased their iPhone 4 bumpers via the online Apple store website, where cases were on backorder due to high demand.

Today, the company has released its own application (iTunes link) to address the remaining lot of unhappy iPhone 4 customers who do not wish to return their phone, but need a bumper case in order to avoid the antenna issues. With the new Case Program app, the software will automatically check various identifiers contained within the iPhone itself, including the IMEI and serial number, to verify that the end user is actually the owner of an iPhone 4.

When eligibility is confirmed, the customer can select an iPhone 4 bumper case, which will then be shipped at no charge.

Interestingly enough, Apple isn't just providing its own cases via the program, but has also listed cases from third party companies, including Incase, Belkin, Griffin and Speck.

Cases will only be available free of charge until September 30, which makes one wonder whether there's any merit to the reports stating that the antenna issues have already been addressed within the supply chain. According to Ashok Kumar, managing director and senior technology analyst at Rodman & Renshaw, "Supply chain checks reveal that Apple has instituted a design fix for the iPhone 4 that more adequately insulates the transceiver module."

Whether or not that's true, Apple made no mention of it or any other planned hardware fixes during its press conference. Hopefully a better solution beyond free rubber cases is on the horizon, however, for those who decide to purchase an iPhone after the free case deadline is up.

YouTube Begins Experimenting With HTML5 Embedable Player

The battle between Adobe Flash and HTML5 will extend into YouTube video players embedded around the web, now that Google has announced a developer preview of video iFrames that use HTML5 when viewed in a browser that supports it. The move seems to represent a big shift in policy from multiple statements the company made just last month criticizing HTML5.

Google began experimenting with HTML5 players on the YouTube site itself in January, but offering HTML5 for the embedded players all over the web is a big step. For users, each new publishing platform that supports HTML5 instead of Flash-only means Apple devices will be able to display that content, that advanced capabilities of the new format will be available and that, according to Flash critics, our devices will run faster and with fewer crashes.

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Users of Chrome on a Mac may also be able to view embedded YouTube videos without wanting to throw our computers into the street in front of oncoming traffic in frustration.

A 180 Degree Turn?

Alex Chitu at the blog Google Operating System points out that it was just a month ago that a YouTube spokesperson said Flash was the only format that supported the kinds of security features that the company considered essential.

Last month YouTube engineer John Harding argued against HTML5 as well. Our own Mike Melanson summarized his arguments like this:

HTML5 video doesn't have the more robust features like camera and microphone access, content protection... HTML5 also lacks the 'robust video streaming' necessary for streaming full movies and live events, as has become more and more common on YouTube. Beyond these features, Flash offers a single video format, whereas the battle over HTML5 video formats (for which Google's recently introduced WebM as one solution) has not yet been won. This means Flash video can be used wherever Flash is installed, while HTML5 depends on video format and browser - an unacceptable condition for YouTube's vast user base.

There's a large ecosystem of development and streaming software built up around Flash as well, not to mention the huge amount of content already published in Flash. The battle between these formats is far from over.

Apparently something has changed and YouTube decided to give it a shot after all.

YouTube says it is testing the feature with developers before offering it to the public at large, and seeks feedback. The announcement included the following example of a video displayed with its new one-line embed code that displays in HTML5 first, if your browser supports it. Update: I'm not clear why, but for some reason this demo video appears to be playing in Flash and not HTML5 after all. Odd.

Facebook Like Moves Beyond the Dumb Grunt, Adds Comments to Like Button

One of the most obnoxious things about Facebook's recent changes has been that clicking a Like button around the web just pushed a dumb, inarticulate grunt out into the newsfeed of your friends. "I Like this thing," it said, and nothing more. Today that's changing, with the inclusion of a writable comment space inside the pop-up that appears when visitors Like something out around the web.

Messages sent with personal comments tend to get more click-throughs, the company said today. These messages will now also include a longer description of what's being liked. This is a great change towards making the point of intersection between Facebook and the larger web richer, more personal and less condescending.

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Update: Readers smarter than I point out in comments below that there have been other methods that enabled commenting in a Like button for some time. I stand corrected! I am also glad that it's now all the easier, including here on ReadWriteWeb.

To Like in Facebook parlance might be to show support for something, it might represent the intention of subscribing to future updates or it might be an action that a user takes solely to gain access to priviledges exclusive to a page's Fans, as they used to be called. Allowing users to post additional commentary just makes sense.

To Like an object is also to give that object's owner some access to your personal and demographic information on Facebook. Such a complex interaction is inappropriate to make as simple as it has been and adding a place for users to annotate the signals they emit into their social graphs is a logical first step.

Remember when George Bush joined Facebook, but in such a way that only people who Liked his Fan page could write comments on it? How many of you would have liked to have added a comment to the message that went out to your friends saying you Liked George Bush? I know I would have.

iPad Art: Who Says You Can't Create With The iPad!

The iPad has taken the tech world by storm this year. In a half-year poll, ReadWriteWeb readers voted it the most important product of 2010 so far. One of the few criticisms of the iPad has been that it's mostly a media consumption device. It doesn't have a camera and writing on the iPad is akin to walking on the moon (everything happens in slow motion).

However, the iPad has gained popularity in the artistic community - in particular thanks to an iPad app called Brushes, which enables you to 'finger paint' a colorful work of art.

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Art web site MutualArt reports that Brushes is being used to produce stunning works of art from professional artists such as David Kassan and Kyle Lambert. And internationally renowned British artist David Hockney recently said that the iPad "really is like a drawing pad. They will sell by the million."

Check out how David Kassan did a finger painting of a subject in this video. Note how he used the zoom feature to attend to details. The end result rivals anything done with paints!

Brushes was originally developed for the iPhone, by two ex-Apple employees: Steve Sprang and Kurt Revis. This year Brushes was redesigned by the pair, to take advantage of the iPad's larger screen.

The iPad app features brush controls, layers, an extensive color palette, zooming, high resolution export and a 'stroke by stroke' playback of the art work's creation. A Users's Guide for the iPad app was released just today.

A Flickr group has been set up for Brushes and it includes a lot of very impressive art work. I have to say, this app gives the lie to the commonly spouted iPad criticism that you can't create media with it - a claim that I heard repeated tonight by a "technology expert" interviewed by a local TV news network.

Android Phones Go to War

Reports this week revealed that U.S. defense contractor Raytheon, maker of the Patriot missile defense system, is developing software for soldiers that runs on Google's Android operating system. The software, called the Raytheon Android Tactical System, or RATS, has already been tested by some members of the U.S. Special Forces. It involves a social-networking type of display where soldiers interact as "buddies" and track each others' movements on the battlefield.

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There's an App for That! Social Networking for Soldiers, Military-Grade Satellite Images

If RATS takes off, soldiers would carry smartphones with them into battle, says this Reuters report released on Wednesday. However, the phones would run identity recognition software so that enemy forces would not be able to unlock the device if they ever got their hands on one of them.

In addition to the soldier buddy tracking system described above, the Android OS could also support applications that deliver satellite images to the phone's large color touchscreen. Military satellites can focus in on minute features you can't see when using consumer-grade technology like Google Earth, so the software installed on RATS could potentially zero in on facial features or be used to read license plates.

The phones running these military-level Android apps wouldn't be standard Nexus Ones or Droids, of course, but specially designed handsets, each costing around $500 - the same price as unlocked consumer smartphones. So far, Raytheon has tested the software on handsets made by Motorola and HTC.

Raytheon would also design and install GPS tracking and encryption onto the phones, as well as communication software to provide coverage where signals don't exist.

Google was a Big Help, Says Raytheon

Raytheon credits Google for its help in the software's development. Says Mark Bigham, VP for defense and civil mission solutions at Raytheon, "We're trying to take advantage of smartphone technology to tailor for what soldiers may need in the field. Google has helped us push the limits of the phone."

Bigham also notes that Google would benefit financially if and when RATS became available to the defense market - a market that isn't just limited to the U.S. Besides the U.S. Army, Bigham says the Indian military is another potential customer for this Android-based technology.

The Cloud Services Market is Looking Like a Red Ocean

Earlier this week, Opsource announced a partner program. The news came on Monday, the first day developers could download code from OpenStack, a separate initiative that has had considerable attention this week.

Both companies provide cloud infrastructure based upon open source. They could easily be part of a same open-cloud network such as OpenStack. But for now Opsource says it will not join the effort lead by Rackspace. Our guess is Opsource competes to some extent with Rackspace and is looking at other alternatives.

Rackspace, Opsource and almost two dozen other companies are now offering a variety of cloud infrastructures. It's an increasingly crowded market that is due for some consolidation. But for the moment, the market is an example of how companies perceive the opportunities the cloud provides.

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Rackspace, as we know, provides public cloud infrastructure. Opsource offers cloud infrastructure to the enterprise, service providers and systems integrators.

Opsource calls its program a partner ecosystem. These partners include integrators, developers, ISVs, cloud platform companies and telecom providers.

Opsource expects 50% of its revenue to come from these partners, and points in particular to telecommunications companies. CEO Treb Ryan:

"The feedback we're getting from the telecoms is that a request for cloud is becoming an increasing part of the RFP's they are seeing from customers. Usually it comes as a request for bundled services (such as managed network, internet access, hosting and cloud.) One of our European telecoms stated they couldn't bid on $2 million a month worth of contracts because one of the requirements was cloud."

Ryan says customers want to work with one company:

"Most likely it's a combination of not wanting to go to separate vendors for separate services (i.e. a colo company for hosting, OpSource for cloud, a telecom for network, and a managed security company for VPN's) they want to get it all from one vendor completely integrated. Secondly, I think many customers have a trusted relationship with their telecom for IT infrastructure services already and they trust them more than a third-party company."

Opsource and Rackspace are two well-established companies in the cloud computing space. But the number of providers in the overall market is beginning to morph.

John Treadway of Cloud Bzz put together a comprehensive list. He says the market is looking more like a red ocean:

"I hope you'll pardon my dubious take, but I can't possibly understand how most of these will survive. Sure, some will because they are big and others because they are great leaps forward in technology (though I see only a bit of that now). There are three primary markets for stacks: enterprise private clouds, provider public clouds, and public sector clouds. In five years there will probably be at most 5 or 6 companies that matter in the cloud IaaS stack space, and the rest will have gone away or taken different routes to survive and (hopefully) thrive."

Lots of blood in the water. Who's going to get eaten first?

We're Going Live Today from OSCON - Come Watch the Stream

We'll be doing a live stream from OSCON, talking to the people here who want to answer our tough questions. :)

The stream will be live at 2:30 p.m. PST.

The first interviews today are with folks from Mashery, Twilio and Mindtouch. Stop by if you'd like to talk or do an interview.

If you are here at OSCON, we are at the small tables by Starbucks, facing the entrance to the Oregon Convention Center.

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Watch live video from ReadWriteWeb on Justin.tv

Link: http://justin.tv/readwriteweb

You can ask questions through our Justin.tv channel or use any of these tags on Twitter: #rwwc, #rwwcloud, #rwwoscon

We'll be streaming until about 4 p.m.

More intellectual property theft, GM lose $40M of hybrid vehicles trade secrets to China industry

A few years ago Intel had an employee walk out the door with their intellectual property and take it to AMD, Intel estimated the value of the information was close to $1 billion! Then there was the case of the IBM executive emailing trade secrets to HP, more recently Ford was hit by a worker taking 4000 confidential trade secret documents and using them to secure a new job with at least one Chinese car company.

Today news has been released that General Motors is the latest US company demonstrating a lack of control over trade secret information. Two ex-employee's have been charged with conspiring to steal trade secrets related to hybrid vehicles from General Motors to pass on to China's Chery Automobile Company. A court in Detroit has charged Sanshan Du and Yu Chin with conspiracy to possess trade secrets and unauthorized possession of trade secrets which can carry a penalty of up to 10 years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine.

Du is accused of copying thousands of GM documents to an external hard drive five days after the automaker offered her a severance agreement in January 2005. General Motors have estimated the value of the stolen information to be about $40 million.

It is quite shocking that these high profile incidents continue to happen when the technology is available which would render the possession of these documents useless, even when someone has copied them to a DVD and sent them to China. Oracle IRM would've ensured that as soon as these employee's had left the company, access to the documents is no longer possible. More importantly, sending these documents to illegitimate parties is a waste of time, only authorized users have the ability to gain access to the information. As a CIO once said to me, "There is no point spending all the security budget on protecting access to the applications, VPN and file shares with identity management technologies when the greater risk is the employee leaving the company who spent the last 2 weeks copying every sensitive document they could to a DVD".

Developers and End-Users Driving Google's Enterprise Strategy Says Forrester

A new report from Forrester analyst Jeffrey Hammond makes the case that Google's support for open-source is endearing the company to developers, who will in turn use Google's development tools to drive enterprise penetration. Hammond also argues that the company's appeal to end-users, through search and tools like Google Docs, will encourage IT managers to spring for Google's enterprise services like Google Apps.

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Hammond cites Google's strong support for open-source as one reason to be optimistic about Google's future in the enterprise. He notes that past Forrester surveys had found that awareness of open-source on the part of enterprise decision makers often lagged its actual adoption. In other words, employees were using open-source solutions to solve problems, but management wasn't always aware of it. The situation has been changing: management is increasingly aware of the benefits of open-source.

Google's development of of the open-source video codec WebM and its open source Google Web Toolkit, its support for HTML5, and the announcement of the Chrome Web Store all work to encouraging enterprise developers to use Google tools.

Meanwhile, Android is slowly making inroads in the enterprise. Android support in the enterprise has grown from 2% in Forrester's Enterprise And SMB Networks And Telecommunications Survey in Q1 2009 to 13% in 2010. Android's use of Java gives developers a familiar set of tools a straight-forward path for development.

Hammond calls information workers Google's "Trojan horse" for enterprise adoption. Forrester's Workforce Technographics Survey, from Q3 2009, found 39% have used online productivity tools such as Google Docs for work related purposes. Hammond speculates this sort of independent end-user adoption will spur further enterprise adoption. "If you've been in the enterprise IT space for any length of time, Google's strategy should feel familiar to you; it's right out of Microsoft's playbook," write Hammond. "As Google appeals to individual users, it opens up a pathway into enterprise IT budgets."

The report concludes that critics shouldn't dismiss Google's enterprise ambitions as half-baked, and encourages decision makers to strongly consider Google's platforms for enterprise application development.

Oracle Application Express - Když už tabulkové editory nesta?í

Je zajímavé jak dlouhý život mají ob?as n?které v?ci. P?ed pár lety, když se na trhu objevila Oracle Database 10g Express Edition, jsem sepsal krátký sešítek ?i p?íru?ku "Když už tabulkové editory nesta?í". V n?m jsem formou Hands On ukázal p?íklad tvorby velmi jednoduché aplikace v Oracle Application Express. Možná se vám sešítek dostal do ruky a hledali jste na v n?m uvedené adrese zkušební data - marn?. Bohužel se ukázalo, že životnost sešítku je delší než životnost stránky, na které byla data publikována.

Abych data nemusel posílat na vyžádání mailem, ?ekl jsem si, že bude dobré je republikovat. No a pro ty, kterým se sešítek do ruky zatím nedostal a p?esto by cht?li o ApEx v?d?t více, p?ikládám i p?vodní Hands On p?íru?ku. Hands-On p?íru?ka, zkušební data.

Je ale pravda, že od doby jejich vytvo?ení se pár v?cí zm?nilo - minimáln? se objevila nová verze ApEx 4.0, se kterou ješt? popis nepo?ítá. Ve verzi ApEx 4.0 se sice nijak nezm?nila základní filozofie vývoje, ale uživatelské rozhraní doznalo ur?itých zm?n, proto mám v plánu p?íru?ku výhledov? aktualizovat.... hned jak najdu trochu ?asu.

Lost in Translation? Hopefully not ...

A VERY looooooong and strenuous week in Tokyo and Hiroshima comes to its end. I came in on Monday morning and my kind colleagues from Oracle Japan had prepared a fully packed (Roy called it "efficient" ;-) ...) schedule for me with several customer and internal meetings. But even though I'm now a bit tired I would like to thank Kota-san and Takuya-san for their excellent organization and the exceptional care-taking program, Negishi-san for taking the lead with our customer willing to test the parallel upgrade, and all the other persons such as Yamamoto-san for the support in Hiroshima, Yosuke-san for the Golden Gate presentation, Mitsuru-san for the discussions about German and Skandinavian Heavy Metal and Takeuchi-san for the insight view into Japanese sales processes and the invitation to try the 12 year old Nikka Yoichi - it did taste wonderful ...!!!

And I'd like to also thank Morohashi-san from HP Japan, one of the Japanese Oracle ACE Members. It was a pleasure to meet with you again. And interested readers might please visit Morohashi-san's blog in Japanese or in the translated version.

StackOverflow for GIS Launches Private Beta

StackOverflow started as software developer Q&A site. The traffic on the site spiked like mad and stayed that way. Then, its founders, Joel and Jeff, had to buy a warehouse to keep their VC money in. Now, they've begun rolling out verticals.

Today, the latest version opened for private beta. GIS StackExchange is for people involved or interested in Geographic Information Systems. The beta is restricted to members of the Area51 GIS community but the public beta will begin on the 29th.

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The verticals are being produced in a very consensus-focused way, which fits the cooperative nature of the original. The Area51 site hosts a large number of proposals for new roll-outs. Among the hottest proposals are a lot which are tech-oriented. No surprise there. What's surprising is how many are not. These include Food and Cooking and (be still my beating heart!) English Language and Usage.

Via Jason Birch

JDeveloper Role files – What are they?

When JDeveloper first starts up, you are prompted to select a Role that you would like to have JDev run in.
If you don't see this dialog at startup, look in the Tools -> Preferences -> Roles menu.

;

For most of us, one of these roles will work just fine. ; But what if you wanted to create your own Role? ; What does it really mean to create your own Role?

To see what each of these roles does behind the scenes, you can take a look at it's source XML file. ; All of the role xml files are located at:

/middleware/jdeveloper/jdev/roles

For the most part, the different roles remove the unneeded extensions, so that JDeveloper only loads what you need for that specific role. ; You can also modify what menus are loaded when the IDE starts. ; This is sometimes referred to as Menu Shaping.

To create your own Role file, it's best to start with one of the existing roles and modify it to meet your needs.

Taking a look at the Java or J2EE Role files will show that they only disable certain extensions. ; No menu modification are made.

To get the best example of what can be done, take a look at the Customization Role (oracle.fusion.cust.role.xml)

In this file you will see two tags that do the work of disabling extensions and hiding the menus

and

Here is an example of a very basic Roles file. ; It only has one disabled extension and one hidden menu.

*********************************************************************************************************

http://xmlns.oracle.com/ide/roles"
; ; ; id="unique_id_of_your_role"
; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; rsbundle="name_of_resource_file"
; ; ; version="1.0">

; My Developer Role
; A Customized role just for me

; ;
;
; ; ; ; ; ; ;
;

; http://jcp.org/jsr/198/extension-manifest"
; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; xmlns:c="http://xmlns.oracle.com/ide/customization">

; ; ; ;
; ; ; ;

; ; ; ; ; ; ;
; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; ; true
; ; ; ; ; ; ;

; ; ;

;

*********************************************************************************************************

After you have created your file, name it something like my_role.xml and save it to the

/middleware/jdeveloper/jdev/roles

directory. ; The next time you start JDeveloper, your role will show up in the list with the name that you set in the Role file as one of the selections

.

I'm pretty much always using the Java role myself, and I use the context menus for most of the actions on the code in the editor. ; ; Here is a complete Role file that I use most of the time. ; It is based on the Java Role file and it also removes a few of the menus that I never use from the main menu bar.

my_role.xml

A list of all the extensions currently running in your version of JDeveloper, can be found in the Help -> About menu under the Extensions tab.

To find Menu IdRef's take a look at my earlier post on How to find the IdRef for most menu commands

Those are the basics of Roles files. ; In a future post, I'll cover how you can use a resource file to help localize the properties used in the role file, and how to package and distribute your role file so others on your team can use the same role if they like.

;

TROUBLESHOOTING

Just in case you run into problems, here are some tips....

-- Make sure that you have the "Always prompt for role selection on startup" checked so that if something goes wrong, you can just select one of the default roles and be back to normal. ; If you need to, you can set this under Tools -> Preferences -> Roles as well.

-- If you don't see your role in the list, it's usually because there is an error in the structure of the xml file. Make sure to validate your xml file after you save it.

-- If JDeveloper fails to load at all, after you select your Role, you are probably trying to disable an extension that is needed by something else that you aren't disabling. ; This is a trial error process unfortunately.

Good luck with creating your own Roles. ; Feel free to leave any ideas or suggestions in the comments.

Oracle Middleware & Partners: The Next Chapter – Andrew Sutherland @ Virtual OPN Day 2010

You want to know the latest around Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g, SOA Suite11g and BPM11g make sure that you watch Andrew Sutherland SVP Middleware EMEA video:

Oracle Middleware & Partners: The Next Chapter

You will get details what our customers are looking for, how we sell middleware and how we can support you!

You missed to attend the Oracle PartnerNetworks Days Virtual Event? Now you can watch all the presentations on-demand. There are three reasons why now is the best ever time to build your business with Oracle:

• Software. Hardware. Complete.’ Oracle’s product and solution portfolio is unique in the industry, allowing you to offer your customers a truly comprehensive technology stack.
• Specialization with Oracle enables you to differentiate and demonstrate the quality of your market offering.
• Oracle continues to invest in a wide range of flexible tools and resources that enable you to develop your Oracle business independently.

The Oracle PartnerNetwork Days Virtual Event will show you how you can leverage these opportunities for maximum growth. As an Oracle partner, this on-demand event is one you simply can’t afford to miss!

IRM Evaluation Documents - Where Are They Now?

Among the key benefits of Oracle IRM is the tracking of external communications, so I thought it might be interesting to summarise a few facts and figures about our evaluation service - which is, after all, a publicly accessible self-registration IRM service.

Oracle has been running the service for about 3 years now, and it has been used by about 3000 users. So, there are at least 3000 copies of our demo documents out there somewhere - but who is using them currently, and where?

To answer this question, I ran an audit report for the last 7 days. The report tells me that there are about 60 users actively using the service right now. The report tells me that those 60 users are spread across about 15 countries - predominantly the USA and UK, but also in China, India, Brazil, Portugal, Germany, Slovakia, Austria, France, Czech Republic, Ireland and others - as shown in the following map.

New users are self-registering via the simple demo page at a rate of 1 or 2 per day. The last few days have seen new accounts created and used by Forrest in China (an Oracle colleague), Telma in Brazil, and Nonogaki in Japan. Welcome aboard - please send us some feedback. Two more have registered while I've been writing this article.

The log also tells me which users are users which documents, which gives some indication of what interests them most. Here is a glimpse of the activities of the three users mentioned above.

This ongoing accumulation of new users by self-registration demonstrates that IRM can quite easily meet the needs of external communication and collaboration without creating an administrative burden. We just sit back and let users register themselves - although in a real deployment we obviously recommend manual and/or automated approval processes for new accounts.

In fact, we don't do any manual rights admin for the new users. The self-registration process grants each new user the rights we want them to have, and those rights apply to pre-existing content as well as any new content we might make available - or that users seal for themselves. We set up a policy framework three years ago, and users just come and go over time without us needing to change anything.

The only time we intervene manually is when we're using the evaluation service to host a formal proof of concept and we want to explore capabilities that the simple demo does not cover.

On top of the admin benefits of self-service, the above facts and figures demonstrate that those of us who run the evaluation service have a powerful insight into who is using and creating sealed documents, how they are using them, how often, where, and when.

Tips for a Startup Infographic

Infographics have become fairly ubiquitous, illustrating more and more news stories, presentations, advertisements. Their popularity is no surprise, perhaps, as we look for new ways to visualize and understand the vast amounts of data we're presented.

Infographics can make information more accessible, more enjoyable, and easier to understand. And when well-crafted, an infographic seems to lend itself to being incredibly viral, with potential to drive traffic and generate interest.

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On his blog Cool Infographics, Randy Krum lists tips for journalists designing infographics. But Krum's suggestions have application beyond journalism. If you plan to use infographics to tell a story, you should keep these things in mind:

1. Be concise. Design your infographic to make one main point.

2. Be visual and be creative. Although infographics do combine text and images, the emphasis should be on making a visually appealing graphic.

3. Be self-explanatory. The visualization should explain the data, with minimal exposition.

4. Be relevant.

5. Be transparent. Cite your sources.

6. Be different. Pie charts and bar graphs are readily understandable, but they can be pretty blase.

7. Be accurate. The visualization should not misrepresent your data.

8. Say something. Your infographic should convey a message, and not be an infographic for the sake of itself.

9. Be judicious. Not every story warrants an infographic.

And as with any copy you plan to post online, it's good to run your infographic by another set of eyes - to assess and edit both content and format.

Some examples:

If you are considering creating an infographic for your startup, spend some time thinking about what it is you want to communicate: your business plan timeline, your market or marketing strategy, your budget or financial projections, your product offerings, or your product differentiation, for example. Your infographic needs to address the right message, as well as the right audience.

Improve Application Uptime and High Availability with Oracle VM

Join Oracle VM experts for a live webinar and find out how you can improve your application uptime and high availability. Oracle VM offers a variety of high availability features to ensure that business critical uptime is maximized. In this webinar, we will address how Oracle VM can help you:

• Achieve higher levels of availability in your data center
• Eliminate unplanned service outages and reduce downtime
• Securely migrate running VMs without service interruption
• Achieve failover redundancy and optimal resource utilization of pool hardware

Technical demonstrations of a number of concepts including shared storage pools, secure live migration, failover and automatic restart of a VM, will be covered in this session.

Details:
Day: July 28, 2010
Time: 9am US PDT

Register here.

Hope you will join us.

Monica

BlindType: Touchscreen Typing for the Maladroit

Worry not, you of the short and stubby fingers, you who lack a bit of dexterity in the digits, you who can't seem to type on your iPhone and Android for the life of you - there is hope. No longer will you have to be angered that your attempt to type the letter "M" resulted in a backspace or "A" turned into a capital letter.

BlindType, an input system currently in development for the iPhone and Android platforms, works to predict not only the word you intended to type, but the letters themselves.

Sponsor

While we'd never recommend trying to type on your phone while driving, there are plenty of other situations where this app could be immensely useful. From sitting in the back of a bouncy bus to simply trying to type faster than the miniscule touchscreen keyboard normally allows, the app gives a much larger margin of error by not only using predictive text, but also adjusting the keyboard to the user's "'perceived' keyboard and typing style".

As you can see in the video, the keyboard is not static, but rather entirely relative to how the user types. The keyboard itself is even unnecessary, as the relative touch points are enough to predict the intended words. It can move on the touchscreen, adjust to different orientations and even change in size. While Kostas Eleftheriou was hesitant to describe exactly how this all worked, he told us that the system adjusts dynamically with every word typed, not just in the long term.

"The average user will probably want to have their keyboard 'locked' into a fixed position, so the scaling and rotation that you see would be happening behind the scenes in order to provide industry-first prediction rates," Eleftheriou told us in an email. "While the system offers many different settings, it will be totally ready to go out of the box without having to tinker with anything first."

While Android users may be able to enjoy the full potential of this app, on the iPhone it will unfortunately suffer the same fate (at least initially) as Opera Mini - a secondary interface that cannot be made default. We asked BlindType's creators about this, and they admitted that Apple does not allow its keyboard to be replaced, as with Android, but that they will offer BlindType for both platforms "if nothing else to put pressure on Apple to finally allow this kind of thing."

PostRank Live with Google Buzz Firehose

Before now, PostRank, the popular social media analytics service, had to manually crawl all Google Buzz accounts and subscribe to the public feeds it found separately prior to meshing that information with the rest of its data. It was unlikely that all the public feeds made it into PostRank and the process "imposed a high server tax for both sides."

Now, however, with the Google Buzz firehose, PostRank subscribes to one real-time PubSubHubbub feed of all publicly-available Google info. PostRank's users, the company says, will notice a big difference in the amount and depth of Buzz content.

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PostRank's Ilya Grigorik explains.

"If you're an Analytics subscriber, then you will see greatly improved coverage of Google Buzz starting today: more users, more meta-data, and a more complete activity stream on your dashboard. And if you're a user of our Data Services, RSS feeds, or API's, then you will also undoubtedly benefit from the improved coverage of Buzz activity: more accurate engagement scores, and more accurate PostRank scores."

PostRank measures the level of public engagement with online content. It determines how interesting and relevant a piece of content (blog post, article, vides, etc.) is "by analyzing the types and frequency of an audience's interaction" it. So the ability to completely represent a popular service like Buzz is integral to maintaining PostRank's efficacy.

Read more ReadWriteWeb coverage of PostRank and Google Buzz.

Legislature Moves to Make Funded Research Public

We noted last year, that many believe U.S. President Obama's push for governmental transparency has been a failure. Whether that's true, the overall tendency toward access continues to gather momentum.

The U.S. House of Representatives has announced a public hearing to explore making publicly-funded research open to the public. Legislators in both the House and the Senate have already introduced bills calling for this. If they pass, the implications could be significant and might result in an economic jump.

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The House Committee on Oversight's Subcommittee on Information Policy will convene the hearing for Thursday, July 29 at 2:00 PM in Room 2154 of the Rayburn House Office Building in D.C. The hearing will allow the Representatives on the Committee to hear input from a variety of stakeholders.

Rep. Mike Doyle (R-PA) introduced the Federal Research Public Access Act into the House on April 15. An identical Senate version of the bill was introduced by Senator Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Senator John Cornyn (R-TX). Bi-partisan support for public access to federal research has been growing.

The bills propose specifically that the 11 federal agencies with research budgets of $100 million or greater make the published results of their research free to the public.

Knowledge is (Economic) Power

If these 11 massive agencies suddenly were required to make their research public (with a governmental value of suddenly), it could possibly act as a shot of adrenaline to the private sector. Who knows what products and services might be launched, or improved, on the back of this research? It could result in a significant leap forward for an economy that seems at times terminally stalled.

Presumably, the government already has the research that they've paid for. (Presumably.) But a public in possession of that information might make for a much less patient public. If a government agency, for instance, knows something that could improve its services, but allows bureaucratic foot-dragging or inter-agency squabbling to slow its implementation, that agency would find itself in, let's say, a compromised position politically when an informed public realized what it was doing.

Having been in a position to listen and talk to career bureaucrats facing change, we are not as sanguine as we could be at the news. It would be surprising indeed if half the people responsible for sharing this information with the pubic didn't go limp at the first approach of torch-wielding villagers at their castle door. To work, this bill will require that the chief executive make it known in no uncertain terms that any agency head with a hitch in his gitalong will shortly thereafter find himself on the street in the company of all his closest advisors.

Data Collection Protocols: AAA (RADIUS, Diameter, and TACACS+)

RADIUS, Diameter, and TACACS+ are three protocols for carrying Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting (AAA) information between a Network Access Server (NAS) that wants to authenticate its links or end users and a shared authentication server. The end user connects to the NAS, which in turn becomes a AAA client trying to authenticate the end user to the AAA server.

On this entry will concentrates on the last "A" of AAA (even though most of the time AAA is not primarily used for billing, but for authentication and authorization). However, when binding the accounting information with the authentication informs, the AAA protocols offer an interesting advantage for billing: the authenticated username.

RADIUS

Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) is a client/server protocol developed by the IETF. The RADIUS client is typically a NAS, and the RADIUS server is usually a daemon process running on a UNIX or Windows server.

The RADIUS client (that is, the NAS) passes user information to designated RADIUS servers and acts on the returned response. RADIUS servers receive user connection requests via the NAS, authenticate the user, and then provide the NAS with configuration information necessary for it to deliver a specific service to the user.

Transactions between the RADIUS client and RADIUS server are authenticated with a shared secret key, which is never sent over the network. In addition, user passwords are sent encrypted between the RADIUS client and RADIUS server to eliminate the possibility that someone snooping on an insecure network could determine a user's password.

The accounting features of the RADIUS protocol can be used independently of RADIUS authentication or authorization. The NAS, which provides a service to the dial-in user (such as PPP or Telnet) is responsible for passing user accounting information to a designated RADIUS accounting server. At the start of service delivery, the NAS generates an "Accounting Start" packet describing the type of service being delivered and the user accessing the service. This packet is sent to the RADIUS accounting server, which returns an acknowledgment (the Accounting-Response) to the NAS, acknowledging that the "Accounting Start" packet has been received. At the end of the service delivery, the NAS client generates an "Accounting Stop" packet, describing the type of service that was delivered and session statistics such as elapsed time, input and output octets, and input and output packets. Here is the complete list of RADIUS accounting attributes, as described in RFC 2866: Acct-Status-Type, Acct-Delay-Time, Acct-Input-Octets, Acct-Output-Octets, Acct-Session-Id, Acct-Authentic, Acct-Session-Time, Acct-Input-Packets, Acct-Output-Packets, Acct-Terminate-Cause, Acct-Multi-Session-Id, and Acct-Link-Count. If the RADIUS server returns no response to the RADIUS client within a defined timeout, the request is resent a number of times. The RADIUS client can also forward requests to an alternate RADIUS server or servers in case the primary server is down or unreachable.

The UDP transport is a major issue in RADIUS accounting, where packet loss may translate directly into revenue loss.

For further references on RADIUS, refer to Table 3-9, which mainly focuses on the RADIUS accounting references. Note, for completeness, that other RADIUS RFCs are available: 2548, 2618, 2619, 2809, 2882, 3162, 3575, 3576, 3579, and 3580.

Note that the IETF RADIUS Extensions Working Group currently is focusing on extensions to the RADIUS protocol required to enable its use in applications such as IP telephony and local-area network AAA. To keep backward compatibility, the working group decided not to define new transports (such as TCP and SCTP).

Diameter

The Diameter protocol, standardized by the IETF Authentication, Authorization and Accounting working group, is the successor to the RADIUS protocol and was developed to overcome several limitations of RADIUS.

AAA protocols such as TACACS+ and RADIUS were initially deployed to provide dialup Point-to-Point Protocol (PPP) and terminal server access. Over time, with the growth of the Internet and the introduction of new access technologies, including wireless, DSL, Mobile IP, and Ethernet, routers and network access servers (NAS) have increased in complexity and density, putting new demands on AAA protocols.

Diameter introduced a couple of improvements compared to RADIUS:

For completeness, RFC 3589 also deals with Diameter, but not with accounting. Note also that several Diameter IETF drafts currently are in progress.

Forums are crap. Can we get some help?

Why Flipboard is Already One of the Best iPad Apps Available (And How it Could be Better)

Social magazine app Flipboard fulfills the promise of the iPad. It pulls down a real-time stream of social data from the cloud and delivers it to users in a bright, personalized, touch-screen interface. The app takes messages and links shared by your friends and other groups on Facebook and Twitter, assembles them as multi-media excerpts with whitespace on touch flippable pages and adds a variety of other social features. It's not a new idea but it's a very big deal.

Launched with high-profile investor backing and an explosion of media coverage, the free app is struggling to perform under a big load of user interest. None the less, it's immediately clear that the promises of syndicated content, social news and a touch interface for real-time information are more real today than they were yesterday.

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Flipboard's user experience is very good. It's design is very good. The way it leads you down a path from viewing a short excerpt, to viewing a longer excerpt annotated with Twitter and Facebook comments in a sidebar to an immediate full-page "view on the web" version that has meanwhile been pre-loaded in the background - that's awesome.

You can opt to hide articles shared by certain users in your stream. You can post comments and replies from inline. You can watch videos inline.

There are preselected channels you can populate your account with, and the company says that the limit of 9 channels per user will be lifted in future versions.

RSS never caught on, most likely a few million people at most are using the most accessible RSS reader on the market. OPML, the format by which you can share collections of dynamic sources in RSS format, is an incredible act of poetry. But no one writes or reads it. Twitter lists in an interface like Flipboard? That's a game changer.

Facebook is the way that hundreds of millions of people have been introduced to the news feed model, a stream of content in reverse chronological order. Flipboard is the first 3rd party interface that has posed a viable challenge to the supremacy of Facebook's own interface, at least for the few million people who own iPads.

Flipboard has taken the model that Twittertim.es and Paper.li have experimented nicely with on the web, and built it out far more richly on the iPad.

How Flipboard Could Be Better

Obviously the Flipboard team is going to need to figure out how to scale to a crush of users. This problem is only going to get bigger as Apple puts support behind the app beyond what the tech press sends its direction. Hopefully it can be solved without too much cost to the timeliness of the content.

Let's assume that problem will be solved, though.

Flipboard needs a few things to be even better. A priority algorithm of some sort would be very useful. Some of the Tweets and Facebook messages I'm shown are not very interesting to me and the interface really makes every one of them look like a must-read. The company's acquisition of the still-unintegrated semantic ranking service Ellerdale will no doubt be aimed at solving this problem.

This is something that Facebook has totally nailed with its News Feed/ Live Feed split. By default I'm shown messages of the type I've interacted with most, from people I've interacted with the most. With a click I can view instead the most recent messages from all my friends. Flipboard would be well served by a similar model.

Cruft text is a clear issue. If you've been able to look at the app, you've seen that all kinds of extraneous text gets published in the excerpts. Flipboard should crowdsource the tidying of this content - add a button to let people suggest sentences, floating words and paragraphs that ought not be displayed in the excerpts. Many links could be cleaned up quickly this way.

Photos are clearly being published on services like Twitter-based Twitpic, Tweetphoto, etc. that are not of a resolution fit for a full-screen iPad app like this. Like cruft text, when you're automating the repurposing of content across different platforms, it takes some strategic thinking about how to present things in the most appealing way in their new context. Little things like following a feed.feedburner URL to display the actual site a post is from would be nice. In some cases, it may prove impossible to translate context. Photos are going to be a big challenge.

Finally, it would be nice if Flipboard went beyond eye-candy and UX and embraced some of the best work of the data developer community. Authentication with Twitter needs to be done without asking a user for their password. Subscription export needs to be supported, both to other platforms like Twitter and in naked XML. Analytics about our reading habits and an API for 3rd parties to build the same would be fabulous.

If you've got an iPad, you've probably already tried Flipboard at least a little. What do you think?

Gowalla Goes to Comic-Con with Blackberry Beta

Location based check-in app Gowalla will be joining the the throngs of furries, Star Wars superfans, comic book aficianados and Joss Whedon devotees at Comic-Con 2010, the yearly mecca of all things drawn, digitized and generally geeky. As many of us found at this year's SXSW in Austin, services like Gowalla and Foursquare really shine when you get thousands of geeks together in one location. What better place than Comic-Con to take advantage of yet another large gathering of potential Gowalla users?

In addition to jumping on the comic book bandwagon, Gowalla quietly announced the beta version of its Blackberry mobile app this week, meaning those Crackberry addicts attending can join in on the fun this week too, without having to visit the mobile website.

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Conference goers will have a number of features available to them, from custom Gowalla badges to real-world incentives. First, Gowalla is teaming up with Tweethouse to offer a $5 discount into the Tweethouse party. The LBS app has also created a series of "trips", which consist of several check-in points on the service and will highlight some of the "must see" places at the convention. In addition to all of this, Gowalla will be giving out free Gowalla t-shirts at several booths, but really, it's the pairing of the service with real-world incentives and interests that peaks our interest. The company has created five custom trips for Comic-Con 2010, such as the I Conquered Comic-Con 2010 trip. Gowalla "trips" feature is unique among the LBS apps we've played with and can be a great way to experience an unfamiliar place. (I plan on checking out the Freedom Trail trip myself this afternoon in Boston.)

As for the newly released beta version of Gowalla for Blackberry, Jared Smith, ReadWriteWeb webmaster and in-house Blackberry user, said that the beta version was faster than the alpha version, but doesn't provide a very "cohesive blackberry experience". Smith said that the notifications were a bit odd, in that they pop up on the screen like an iPhone rather than showing up in the title bar - the norm in the Blackberry user interface. This was an opinion echoed by others on Gowalla's website.

The beta version of the Blackberry client is available by pointing your Blackberry's browser to Gowalla.com or by downloading the client and syncing to your device. Gowalla is soliciting feedback in its forums.

What is the problem? AT&T or Apple?

Dear Apple Customer,

Thank you for your recent Apple Store order. We appreciate your patience and apologize for the inconvenience caused by the delay in your iPhone activation.

We are still resolving the issue that was encountered while activating your iPhone with AT&T. Unfortunately, due to system issues and continued high activation volumes, this could take us up to an additional 48 hours to complete.

On Monday, you'll receive an email from Apple with an iTunes Store credit in the amount of $30. We hope you will enjoy this gift and accept our sincere apologies for the inconvenience this delay has caused.

Thank you for choosing Apple.

Sincerely,
Apple Online Store Team

ChompStack Aims to Bring Restaurant Owners to the Mobile Web

If you carry a Web-enabled phone and you like to eat, chances are it's happened to you. You're out. You're hungry. You want to check out a new restaurant nearby, or perhaps you're visiting another city. You pull out your phone to search for a restaurant. Even if you use a fancy, location-based app like Yelp or UrbanSpoon, you still want to see what's on the menu. So you click through to the restaurant's site, and... nothing. Turns out, the restaurant owner paid some kid who knew Flash to built a slick website for them five years ago that has no chance of loading on the BlackBerrys and iPhones of today.

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EnterChompStack. Like other tools we've covered, ChompStack is a Web-based, WYSIWYG tool for building mobile websites, but one that was designed for restaurant owners specifically. Much like the desktop Web before it, the mobile Web continues to explode, but not every restaurateur has the resources to hire a developer to build them a mobile-friendly site.

Recognizing these realities, ChompStack CEO Steven Wei set out to build a product he could market to restaurant owners and take the heavy lifting out of building mobile Websites for an industry that can't afford to miss out on mobile opportunities.

From one simple back-end interface, ChompStack customers can manage menus, pricing information, promotional deals, locations and other business details. Adding static pages, Google Maps directions and a click-to-call phone number is matter of a few clicks.

The control panel also enables customization of branding and color scheme, as well as a site preview tool for those who may not have brand new iPhone 4, Droid X and BlackBerry Bold handsets laying around the kitchen.

Crucially, CompStack integrates with social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, Yelp and OpenTable.

The service starts at $15 per month for single-location restaurants, $30 for those with multiple locations or $45 for larger chains.

AT&T is a bleepity bleeping bleep

1. You can't buy or activate an iPhone without a data plan. ; But, clearly they had mine working without one.
2. They turned off SMS for my whole family, but, the first thing my kids got after they turned it off was an SMS that I bet they would have charged us for.
3. We could not send MMS at all for our whole account after the new iPhone was purchased. ; It is well known that AT&T is not allowing MMS on the new iPhone yet. ; Guess they control this at the account level?

Slacker News: Slacker Radio Gets Streaming News with ABC

When we think "slacker", we think dirty jeans, video games, gas station food and couches. But now, a partnership between ABC News and streaming music service Slacker Radio is looking to redefine our knee-jerk association, bringing news to those who can't care enough to actively chose their music. (We jest.)

The partnership was first announced back in January at the Consumer Electronics Show, but is finally going live today.

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Slacker Radio is a music recommendation engine much like Pandora, in that it lets you chose an artist or song and then creates a streaming music station based on that selection. The service also provides a number of pre-set stations to chose from, such as "Indie Hits" or non-vocal "Classic Jazz". The service is available on a number of devices, including iPhones, Android, Palm and Windows phones.

The partnership is the first we've seen between a streaming music service and a news service. ABC's content will be available in two ways - as a separate stream of news and as a top of the hour update, which will interrupt streaming music with a news update each hour. The service will initially be available to Slacker Radio Basic listeners for 14 days, while Slacker Radio Plus listeners, who pay a $3.99 monthly fee, will have unlimited access to the content.

According to the site, news will consist of "a mix of the day's most compelling news including Headlines, US and World news, Sports, Business, Politics and more" and will be added throughout the day. According to the release, the news station "features segments from ABC News programs, including "Good Morning America" anchored by Robin Roberts, George Stephanopoulos, Juju Chang and Sam Champion, "Nightline" anchored by Terry Moran, Cynthia McFadden and Martin Bashir and much more." Users will have the ability to skip and queue stories just as they can with music.

Overall, we really like the idea of an hourly real-world interruption of our streaming music and hope to see a similar option make its way into other services.

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FreshBooks Announces Integration with SalesForce for Easy Invoicing

FreshBooks announced today that its popular online invoicing platform will integrate with SalesForce's cloud-based CRM portal, allowing companies to manage their billing and CRM from one interface.

Starting today, SalesForce customers can purchase a DataSynch plug-in from PERVASIVE DataSolutions to link their SalesForce customers with client data in FreshBooks.

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Once this is set up, SalesForce users will be able to turn automatically closed and won deals into FreshBooks invoices and then track the status of those invoices from the SalesForce interface. The DataSynch plug-in can run on a schedule or on demand.

With more and more companies doing business in the cloud, integrations like this provide a seamless experience among applications, simplifying life for companies large and small.

The DataSynch plug-in required to connect SalesForce and FreshBooks is available for $19.95 per month, after a free trial period of 30 days.

Early Bird Discount Extended!

You can still register to attend the world's greatest gathering of Java developers at a BIG discount! Sign up by July 30 for JavaOne.

70,000 Blogs Shut Down by U.S. Law Enforcement

Blogetery, a Wordpress platform, has seen its entire community shut down by its host, BurstNET. Subsequent statements by BurstNET indicated that the service was suspended at the request of an unidentified law enforcement agency.

"(Blogetery) was terminated by request of law enforcement officials, due to material hosted on the server. We are limited as to the details we can provide to you, but note that this was a critical matter and the only available option to us was to immediately deactivate the server."

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The gist of the conversation on the discussion board initially indicated that copyright infringement might have been the motivation. Torrent services, like Bittorrent, are the frequent target of legal actions as they are an efficient way to share large amounts of information, such as television shows or movies. This does not appear to be the case, however. The owner stated that the service dealt with copyright issues without prior problems.

"(I) got C&D letters from copyright owners to remove pages with links to torrent/rapidshare. I always handle such abuse reports within 24 hours and remove such material."

BurstNET responded that "this was not a typical case, in which suspension and notification would be the norm." A spokesperson for the company later told CNET that this case had nothing to do with copyright violations.

On the discussion board, a BurstNET representative subsequently said:

"Simply put: We cannot give him his data nor can we provide any other details. By stating this, most would recognize that something serious is afoot...This is the last post we will make on this subject."

As things currently stand:

• 70,000 people have been cut off from their blogs
• The law enforcement agency involved has not been identified
• The alleged wrongdoing on the part of the platform has not been made public

That "something serious is afoot" is a description, not an explanation. Keeping this sort of thing private may be warranted, at least when it comes to the details. But the sensible thing for this unnamed agency to do, if in fact it exists and is an actor in this drama, would be for it to issue an official statement with at least some verifiable information in it.

URL blocked graphic by Wesley Fryer

Hurricane Season: The Push for Cloud-Based Disaster Recover Plans

There's an old Dilbert comic in which Dilbert explains his company's disaster recovery plan: it consists of running around in a panic, screaming "help! help!" As with most Dilbert comics, the comedy is intertwined with the tragic truth: most of us are woefully unprepared - at work and at home - for a disaster that wipes out our technology and our data.

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We're a month or so into the official hurricane season for both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the time of year when those who find themselves in the path of destructive storms determine what sorts of precautions they will take to protect their homes, businesses, lives, and yes, their data. A series of stories this past week in the Miami Herald on the adoption of cloud computing in what the story calls "mainstream firms" in south Florida may be well-timed then. In addition to efficiency and cost-savings touted by the article, the need for a disaster recovery plan is also part of what is driving many businesses in the region to adopt cloud technologies. Cloud-based services, according to one local data center manager cited in the article, are the fastest growing segment line for his company, and the demand for them is growing at an increasing rate.

While the Miami Herald article notes that it's still a small number of firms in the region that have embraced the cloud, it may be that the ease with which cloud-based disaster recovery plans can be implemented is what helps convince more individuals and more businesses - not just in south Florida - to reconsider some of their uncertainties about cloud computing.

The humorous pandemonium in the Dilbert cartoon aside, many small and medium sized businesses have foregone disaster recovery plans because they are costly and cumbersome. How will you administer your remote storage? How will you transport the data there? How will you make sure the information is synced? How will you test it regularly? Before the advent of cloud-based tools, developing a formal disaster recovery plan often wasn't very practical.

And while there are still challenges (the bandwidth required to move massive amounts of data being one of them), the cloud can make it much easier to implement a disaster recovery plan:

It's not simply those in hurricane-prone regions that need to consider disaster recovery obviously, but as the hurricane season heats up, it may be a good reminder about the importance of planning for the worst.

What Keeps The CIO Awake At Night

In this videoblog I discuss some work that a colleague of mine, Toby Hatch, did. Her analysis of a CIO Survey revealed interesting conclusions... Look at the videoblog here.

frank

The Most Important Conference...in the Universe! Part Two

State of the Browsers and ad blocking

Engineers Work In Their Sleep

The Pioneer Behind @ComcastCares, Frank Eliason, Resigns

Frank Eliason, the man behind the ballyhooed Twitter account @comcastcares, announced his resignation from giant cable and internet provider Comcast this afternoon. Companies interested in social media, and that's just about all companies these days, have watched @comcastcares very closely.

Eliason was named Senior Director in National Customer Operations at Comcast just one year ago and has only been at Comcast at all for less than 3 years. Stardom can be built up fast in the young world of social media, however, and as a widely studied ground-breaker Eliason could likely now get a job at almost any company in the world. A specific but unnamed opportunity to do social media work in the financial services industry, where Eliason has worked for years before, is next on his agenda, according to his blog post on the Comcast site.

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While "the man behind the curtain" has been a dominant metaphor for magic for many years, Eliason was instead the man in front of the curtain at Comcast. Working behind him were a team of people with personas like @ComcastBill and @ComcastBonnie. There was also a substantial amount of new social media tracking technology powering the ostensibly personalized customer care the company grew famous for.

If you tweet about problems with Comcast, someone responds. Quickly. And they stick with you. It's not just because you're special though, or even just because they are. The Comcast customer service team uses the latest and greatest social media CRM (customer relationship management) software, behind the scenes.

We described that technology in detail in April 2009, (This Machine Eats Tweets: The System Behind @Comcast and Others) at a time when the field of social media CRM was less widely adopted and discussed.

Eliason and his team built an incredible amount of goodwill and industry admiration through their customer service work on Twitter. @ComcastCares will long be a case study taught in schools. Comcast hasn't traditionally been a much-loved company and Eliason really made an impact on the public's perception. (Was his resignation motivated by having been one-upped by the Old Spice guy this week and needing to do something new to regain his crown? Imagine if that were the case!)

Can Eliason do something as marvelous in financial services? That's no small challenge, and his next gig won't be the first of its kind in the same way. It will, however, be interesting to watch.

Starting today, you can follow Frank Eliason on his new Twitter account, @FrankEliason.

Oracle Service Bus 11g Launch Webinar

Those of you using existing versions of Oracle Service Bus or SOA Suite, or those who are interested in implementing an enterprise service bus should definitely attend the Oracle Service Bus 11g Launch Webinar next Tuesday (20th July 2010) to find out more about the latest release and it’s new features.

To register, click the link here.

Expect to see me talk about some of these new features on this blog in the future.

Knowledge Pathways - Personalized Content

Looking for a way to reduce the number of hours users spend in trainging? Use the personalized content feature.

When the Allow personalized content option is available and enabled, users can choose between taking the full content or personalized content. Personalized content is a subject customized for a user based on his/her assessment results. After taking an assessment, users are presented with the personalized content option. Users see how they scored in all major sections of the subject and based on those scores, certain sections can be excluded from the personalized content. Managers can use the options in the Personalized Content area of the Subject page to specify scores that result in sections being automatically excluded from or included in the personalized content.

Exclusion Percentage

A manager can type a score in this field that represents competency in the subject matter. If the user meets or exceeds this score in certain sections, these sections are automatically excluded from the personalized content. For example, the exclusion percentage is set at 90. All sections for which a user scores 90% or better are automatically excluded from the personalized content when the user is presented with assessment results. However, the user always has the option of including these sections, if desired.

Required Percentage

A manager can type a score in this field that represents an unacceptable level of understanding of the subject matter. If a user scores below the required percentage in certain sections, these sections are automatically included in the personalized content and the user cannot exclude them. For example, the required percentage is set at 60. All sections for which a user scores below 60% are automatically included in the personalized content and the end user cannot exclude them manually.

Important Reminder

The score in both the Exclusion Percentage and Required Percentage fields defaults to 100. If you do not change the values in these fields, none of the subject sections will be optional for inclusion in the personalized content. Sections for which a user scored 100 will be automatically excluded from the personalized content, and sections for which the user scored 99 or less will be automatically included in the personalized content.

More details on Safe Switch Program: Easy to Switch from Sybase Systems

Taken from a Recent DB Newsletter, but worth a reprint. Btw, Lance is my boss and leads our global Migration Team.

The original from Database Insider is here

Migrating away from old legacy systems is a smart way to improve IT efficiency and cut costs--an imperative for many companies in today's economy. According to Lance Knowlton, Oracle's VP of platform migrations, migrating Sybase installations to Oracle has emerged as a sensible way to meet this need.

"Our customers are telling us that it's increasingly difficult to find people with deep Sybase knowledge," he says. "That skills shortage drives up salary and from there the cost per transaction. One customer recently told us that the number one cost item for them from a relational database perspective was Sybase."

For these companies, Oracle provides the Safe Switch program, which enables them to trade in their Sybase or other non-Oracle databases for Oracle Database 11g. In addition, Oracle also provides hands-on expertise, migration tools, and an online technology migration center to help companies migrate their legacy database applications.

Migration Workshops
As companies plan migrations, many have turned to Oracle for help finding the most effective migration path. "We have a series of practical workshops to talk about the migration strategies and best practices of moving from Sybase to Oracle," he says. Plus, migration tools such as Oracle SQL Developer help customers identify the different areas that will be affected by migration and simplify the entire process. "For many customers, that's all they need, and their DBAs are off and running," says Knowlton.

For customers that need more help, Knowlton points to Oracle's partner ecosystem. "Our specialized partners can help from end to end in the process of moving both data and applications over," he says. And finally, there is the shared service route, which allows companies to create a shared database platform on something like Oracle Exadata. "This allows the data costs to be spread out among different organizations while still moving away from those legacy platforms," Knowlton says.

Learn more about the Safe Switch program.

RFID Helps Indian Company Trap Ghost Workers

An Indian company, Unity Infraprojects, is using RFID tags from Mumbai-based Essen to keep track of so-called "ghost workers."

UI is working to replace two pipelines leading from Lake Tansa to Mumbai. This is an important water source for this immense city. In order to make the project happen, Unity must employ a very large number of contract employees. If any significant number of these employees fail to show, it could effect the timeline and that could result in steep fines for the company; not to mention Unity will have to pay the employment companies providing the workers unless they can prove they were absent.

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So, they provide each employee an RFID tag containing worker-specific details, including the identity of the labor agency. According to India's Business Standard newspaper, each worker's image will then captured by an Ethernet camera and stored in a database.

Since most of the workers employed on the project are day-laborers, the information on each worker's tag will be matched to the information in the database each evening as they line up to be paid. Only a combination of RFID evidence and physical presence can elicit an employee's daily payment.

Mumbai skyline photo by Bluesmoon

SCOOP!! SECRET PICTURES OF VP's OFFICE & [TOP SECRET] VIRTUAL DESKTOP SET-UP!!!

We're pretty excited about the Sun Ray Server Software and Thin Client hardware, as we are about the desktop in general: Windows desktops, Linux workstations, Solaris...all of it. We can deliver it all (not just Windows like those other guys...) through our Sun Ray and/or VDI infrastructure products. (And for those of you that are more comfortable around a terminal/remote services model, we've got our Secure Global Desktop software from Sun's acquisition of Tarantella so you can access just about any kind of server-resident application or desktop even if they are not browser based. Or even if they are...stop worrying about client hardware browser dependencies and just use a single version of the Secure Global Desktop web client to access a broad range of browser versions when your desktop browser standard doesn't match with what your app requires.)

Anyway. I digress from the main point of my entry here which is to show you yet another proof point for Oracle's love of the desktop. At great risk to my career, I slid into my bosses office (Wim Coekaerts, Senior Vice President for Linux and Virtualization Development and Support) and snapped a picture of his office, and published it here for the first time anywhere...

Now anyone that knows Wim knows he's pretty solidly into the category of the neo-maxi-zoom-techno-geek. He LOVES to play around with the products in his group. And by play around, I don't just mean "use". I mean install, configure, hack-on, etc. He's loving this stuff and thinks and talks about it with great passion as you might guess by looking at his office.

We have a lot of plans for this space and you've already started to see- and hear about some of them.

We recently released the new Sun Ray 3+ Client (shown) with its higher security, more eco-friendliness, and higher powered support for displays. In fact, you can see in the spy shot, that Wim is taking advantage of the fact that the Sun Ray natively supports up to two 30" displays without any additional graphics adapter required so you can have a 60 inch wide desktop if you want! (I think his is only 41 or 42 inch here though...). Aside: Cool Sun Ray trick: you can actually then combine up to 16 Sun Rays, with 2 displays each into one massive, 32 display wall of Sun Ray desktop greatness! Now that's a big desktop!

We also just announced a new release of the Sun Ray Server Software ("shown") to support VMware View 4 as the VDI back-end, as well as an update to the Oracle Virtual Desktop Client (to access your Sun Ray and VDI desktops from your desktop/laptop) with the update now providing support from Mac clients.

And, certainly, last but not least, we've done a number of Oracle VM VirtualBox enhancements to support even more feature rich usage on desktops and as a part of our Oracle VDI solution where it hosts the VMs and that uniquely allows us to support not only Windows desktops, but also Linux and Solaris Workstations...all with RDP! That's handy if you got a lot of "normal" desktops to virtualize but also, say, want to virtualize all the workstations your developers use that run Linux or Solaris.

Now...hold on a second here...aside from the Linux Penguin Lamp and the Iron Man movie poster (staring Larry Ellison!!!!)...what else interesting can we see in this picture? Well, I did have to blur out the [TOP SECRET] in this picture, otherwise this truly would be a career-limiting blog entry. So, for now, let's just say we're not standing still my friends...

Latest Amsn with Anti-Aliasing

3 Deadly Mistakes made by SaaS Providers

Getting paying subscribers - that is by far the biggest expense for any SaaS provider. And so that means a SaaS company has to be pretty careful about the way it spends its money.

So what are the three deadly SaaS marketing mistakes? According to the blog, Practical Advice on SaaS Marketing, they are as follows:

Spending Money to Lose Money

Drew Houston of Dropbox learned the hard way what can happen when he decided to do an AdWords campaign. It cost Dropbox $233 to $388 to attract customers. But the product sold for $99. Houston had one word to describe the experience:

"Fail!"

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But what he came away with is a handy equation for the SaaS company thinking about its costs:

CAC>CLV

CAC stands for "customer acquisition costs." CLV is defined as "customer lifetime value."

As Peter Cohen explains, on the CAC side it may be big events, high priced events and clever but way too expensive giveaways. CLV issues may be not turning free subscribers into paying ones.

Houston provides an insightful story about the failure of best practices and the success that comes when you invest in your own community.

Dropbox Startup Lessons Learned

Racing Against the Clock

You can try to make up for the CAC by trying to make up in the long run for your short term losses. This approach means that the SaaS provider has to reduce the CAC costs and make lots of money before the cash gets all burned up

This can be a deadly game but it can work. SucessFactors did it. According to Cohen:

"CAC/annual revenue reached 112% at one point, but over time has come down to a more sustainable 53%. They out-grew the cash burn."

Bailing with a Tea Cup

This is a problem of underspending. Sales and especially, marketing, can be seen as a hindrance. We see it way too often. Antipathy for marketing leads to cynicism and sometimes outright hostility. But it is the sales and marketing who do the heavy lifting. They are responsible for getting the leads and making the sales.

But if there is always the pressure to do it on the cheap then it can lead to problems. The company doesn't have the resources in sales and marketing to get the job done.

Cohen:

"SaaS companies will typically spend much more on sales and marketing as a percentage of revenues than their licensed software brethren. Concur, for example, spends 31% of its annual subscription revenues on sales and marketing, and Salesforce.com spends 54%. For nearly all companies, customer acquisition costs will be the single largest expense on the income statement."

Running a SaaS service is not for the faint of heart. But the geeks in us feel that Dropbox is the best example of a company that built on the loyalty of its early adopters. Word of mouth helped them reach 1 million subscribers - that's something most services never achieve.

Discuss

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WIRED Predicted the iPad...11 Years Ago (Picture)

The iPad isn't just a touch-screen dream come true for millions of people around the world...it's the realization of a prediction WIRED Magazine made a whopping 11 years ago.

In the April 1999 issue, the magazine's Hype List column discussed Apple's then-recent financial turn-around and said: "The next iMac attack promises new lollipop laptops, a more serious series of professional machines, and a wireless handheld dubbed the iPad." Betsy Mason, Science Editor for Wired.com today, posted the cell phone photo below of the magazine to Twitpic today and it showed up on Reddit late this afternoon.

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Pretty cool, huh?

Flickr Fixes Facebook Integration With Batch Uploads

Last month, social photo-sharing site Flickr finally added some long-awaited Facebook integration to its service, allowing users to simultaneously post photos on both Flickr and Facebook with one upload. But there was a small problem with the way that the new feature was set up: it basically spammed your Facebook Wall with post after post about your new photos.

Today, that problem has been fixed, reports Flickr.

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For those users who uploaded more than one photo at a time (and that's most of us!), using the new Facebook integration feature made each and every new Flickr photo uploaded its own individual post on your Facebook Wall and friends' News Feed. After processing a big set of photos, your Facebook page would end up covered in nothing but Flickr posts.

That issue has been fixed so that it now identities these multi-picture posts as batches.

Over on the Flickr blog, Consumer Marketing Manager Larissa Zimberoff writes, "When we first launched we sent updates for every upload but have recently made a change so that we only send an update for each batch of uploads."

It's a line to make any Flickr and Facebook user rejoice.

Other Reminders: Getagging and Twitter Integration

Zimberoff also took the time to highlight a couple of other Flickr features which users may not be aware of, including geotagging and Twitter integration. Users can geotag their photos (add location information to them) by using Flickr's Organizr - just drag and drop the photos on the map where they were taken. Note that some smartphones automatically geotag photos for you, without any additional configuration.

Twitter integration can be achieved via an app called Flickr2Twitter, which tweets the subject line of your photo along with a link.

How to Turn it (Back) On

But really, today's blog post could read "We fixed the Facebook integration," and that would have been enough for us.

To turn this feature back on, head over here and then click "Sharing and Extending" (far right). Then click the "edit" button next to Facebook to switch activity updates back on. Or if you've never added Facebook integration to begin with, click the "Connect" button to get started.

New version of IRM Hot Folders, 2.2.0

Activity galore at the moment, a new release of IRM 11g in the past month, the IRM Wrapper utility was born and released and now an update to the very useful HotFolders application. A feature request from a few days ago has already been written into the handy tool, allowing an integration of the IRM Wrapper and HotFolders. Essentially HotFolders monitors a folder for new files and then automatically seals them to a predefined Oracle IRM classification. However it only worked for the formats that are supported by Oracle IRM.

The IRM Wrapper however addressed the use case where people wanted to just use the Oracle IRM service to encrypt and securely deliver/store ANY file. Whilst this doesn't come with any of the superb persistent document and email security controls that ensures constant protection of IRM supported files even in use. It does mean that you can leverage the same scalable classification system in IRM to protect the transfer and storage of sensitive files. This is a nice and simple encrypted delivery mechanism, much like PGP, but with a more scalable and usable classification system behind it.

So the latest version of HotFolders, 2.2, now has the ability to wrap files in IRM encryption. This means you can now monitor a folder, and ANY file that is placed in it will be protected with Oracle IRM. Supported formats will gain persistent protection, whilst non-supported formats get wrapped with encryption. Keep an eye out on the blog, we will soon have an update to the IRM Wrapper utility as well...

As a reminder, here is the list of the functionality available in this utility.

• NEW! "Wrap" files in previously non-sealable formats using core IRM encryption/classifications
  
• Easy to configure
  
• Automatically scan and seal multiple file system folders, and sub-folders
  
• Warn, delete or quarantine when unable to seal
  
• Support for multiple IRM Servers
  
• Cross-platform (Java and IRM web services)
  
• Support for any network-accessible file system
  
• Easily scheduled using cron or Windows scheduler
  
• Configurable file and console based logging, with log rotation
  
• Fully internationalised (but only EN resource bundles supplied)
  
• Pass files over-the-wire or by relative path (far faster)
  
• Easy to configure, built-in scheduling
  
• Huge performance improvements via in-memory caching of file modification timestamps
  
• Automatically scan and seal SharePoint folders
  
• Automatically scan and seal WebDAV folders
  
• Automatically scan and seal web folders, content management and collaborative repositories
  
• Easily develop Java plugins to perform post-sealing actions
  
• Shovel - a file relocation plugin (return sealed files from quarantine to original locations!)
  
• Full source code available on samplecode.oracle.com in a CollabNet TeamForge repository that includes a Subversion version control repository - so feel free to join the project and contribute your own source code (bug fixes, features, plugins, localisations, etc.).
  
• Support for Oracle IRM 11g and Oracle IRM 10g servers.
  
• Support for secure HTTPS connections between Oracle IRM Hot Folders and Oracle IRM 11g servers.
  
• Checklist to guide you through the simple steps required to get Oracle IRM Hot Folders up and running.
  
• Support for grid deployment (Oracle IRM core and sealing servers running on different hosts)
  
• Optional prompting for credentials (so no need to store in configuration file)
  

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Introducing Oracle Service Bus 11g—Extending Oracle SOA Suite Leadership - Live Webcast

Event Date: Tuesday, July 20, 2010 Time: 10 a.m. PT/1 p.m. ET

Oracle Releases Dramatic Performance and Scalability Innovations within Oracle Service Bus 11g
With Oracle Service Bus you can do more than ever with new and existing SOA infrastructures. You can transform complex and brittle architectures into flexible integration networks. Now you can connect, mediate, and manage interactions between services and applications across the extended enterprise.
Join Demed L’Her, Director of Product Management at Oracle and Bruce Tierney, Principal Product Director at Oracle in this live webcast as they discuss the innovations in Oracle Service Bus 11g that deliver extreme performance, scalability, agility, and cloud service integration. Discover how you can leverage this complete, open, and integrated SOA solution to:

• Shorten response time by up to 80% for commonly requested data
• Reduce demand on back-end applications by 60% or more
• Reduce risk as your infrastructure expands to include more cloud services
• Introduce service virtualization to migrate your services into a shared services infrastructure
• Implement an “embrace and extend” strategy by leveraging your existing services and legacy enterprise service bus with Oracle Service Bus

Register for this live Webcast, another edition in a series introducing the next wave of products in
Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g.

Apple offers free cases to iPhone 4 owners

Every Machine Can Be Used To Watch You. Interested in Privacy?

What if your activities were watched and recorded so we could not only catch you for any crime but could maximize how much money we make selling you stuff? An editorial by Toby Considine over at Automated Buildings suggests that this is fast becoming the future we're moving into.

Considine gives one example of a British murder conviction that was based on evidence obtained via Electrical Network Frequency Analysis (ENF). While detectives have long been rendering this kind of data by deciphering faint signals from the machines we use, what's new is the huge increase in devices that can be monitored. The cost to capture and store data continues to drop, too. Enter the talented salesperson who knows the more they know about you, the more money they make. Enter a new era of a trillion Web-connected devices known as the Internet of Things. Got privacy?

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Considine's editorial has a remarkable title and a lengthy byline: Smart Energy and the End of Privacy - There is now no reason ever to throw out information. Operational data will be the new battleground for privacy.

Google Street View

As routinely covered in This Week in Online Tyranny the Google cars are in trouble for trolling neighborhoods for web traffic data. Or how about today's coverage of Google vs. World, which is a map that highlights Google legal woes, many of which are related to privacy. Considine refers to the basis upon which these legal concerns are being raised when he says:

"Without privacy, the social contract is changed. Zero tolerance combined with no privacy removes every civil right we have. The CEO of Google has stated "Privacy is dead, get used to it." On the other hand, the German high court recently mandated early deletion of all cell tower data, web traffic, IM tracking, and other "personal acts." The battle for privacy is already publicly engaged. The more people know, the more people are going to care."

They'll Want To Run You the Way They Run Casinos

Considine also explains how an early adopter of building unique data profiles for each individual customer are casinos in Las Vegas. The super secret Wal-Mart data centers in Missouri and Arkansas have also long been suspected of similar surveillance technologies. In short, your behavior is being charted to maximize your profitability. What's more, once users start wiring their homes to a smart grid in order to be more green your unauthorized sales representative may be able to discern your purchasing patterns based on the types of devices you plug into your walls. Or what if you didn't know that you were pinging TV advertisers every time you took food out of your internet-connected refrigerator?

Ads With Eyes post explained the Center for Democracy & Technology's report about how digital signage with face recognition and RFID sensing are going to identify you and communicate with you in ways that are profitable for advertisers. But what about your right to opt out? Will these ads be able to sell your facial recognition and purchasing data to other advertisers?

Public Oversight

Learning how to maintain our privacy amid so many newly introduced Web-connected machines is not going to be easy. Yet European leadership and even US congressional hearings are beginning to take note. As Internet of Things continues to develop more privacy issues are going to arise. That's in part why ReadWriteWeb's Marshall Kirkpatrick's recorded a new podcast called: Thoughts on Privacy and the Internet of Things

If you have any additional insight that may benefit our readers regarding this issue please post them in the comments below.

photos from (in order) Wiki Commons, John Delorey and A. Strakey.

links for 2010-07-16

• SRS 5: Big updates disguised in a patch - Think Thin Blog
  ThinGuy offers highlights of some of the new features included in the new Oracles Sun Ray release.
  (tags: oracle sun sunray linux solaris virtualization)
• Edwin Biemond: OSB 11g ANT deployment scripts
  "With these scripts you can make an export of a project from sbconsole and make a deployment / configuration plan and you can import a project jar to the sbconsole." -- Oracle ACE Edwin Biemond
  (tags: oracle otn oracleace servicebus soa)
• Oracle Develop Conference Blog: Last Chance to Save Up to $400 - Today!
  Today, Friday July 16, is the last day you can take advantage of early bird disounts on Oracle Develop registration. If you snooze, you lose.?
  (tags: oracle javaone oracledevelop openworld)
• Oracle E-Business Suite AccessGate Release 1.0.2 Now Available (Oracle E-Business Suite Technology)
  Kieth Swatrz with details on the update to the Oracle E-Business Suite AccessGate component, which provides integration with Oracle Access Manager 10gR3.
  (tags: oracle otn security fusionmiddleware)

CloudCamp at OSCON: 5 Topics We'd Like to Discuss

We are thinking of how to get the most out of CloudCamp at OSCON on Monday night as the discussions will be exclusively about open-source and the cloud.

So we decided why not write down some topics that we'd like to explore. These are in no particular order but just generally what we are thinking about. A lot of these questions come from trends and topics of discussion we are seeing on the Web.

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Let's get started:

The Basics

A simple discussion on the different components of the open cloud.

Questions: What is the anatomy of the open cloud? What are its components at the node and system infrastructure level? What are the dynamics of the current market that is affecting its overall structure?

On Azure and Proprietary Systems

A general discussion to explore Windows Azure's significance and how other proprietary systems are affecting the direction of cloud computing.

Open-Source Database Explosion!

According to Kin Lane, a boom in open-source database offerings is evident in looking at the exhibitor list at OSCON. What's happening is a disruptive change that the database world has not seen in the past 20 years. What are the dynamics of this trend?

Interoperability: Will It Ever Happen?

Interoperability between service providers can help avoid vendor lock-in. But will interoperability ever happen? Are there any brewing open source standards so data can be easily moved between services? Are standards needed?

On Open-Source SaaS

SaaS services are proliferating. What are the emerging principles of open-source SaaS environments? What will open-source SaaS services look like in the years ahead?

That's a start. There are any number of discussions to be had at an event like CloudCamp.

I am the local organizer for CloudCamp Portland. Hope you can make it if you are in town. CloudCamp Portland will start on Monday at 7 pm in the Oregon Convention Center. It is free to attend.

Opera 5.1 for Android Outpaces Safari in Side-by-Side Comparison [VIDEO]

Back in April when Opera Mini was released into the AppStore, as an iPhone user I naturally downloaded it and checked it out. Yes, some pages loaded faster, but navigating was choppy and there was no way to make it the default browser. These days I am lucky enough to have both an iPhone and an Android device - the latter of which saw an updated version of Opera hit the market today. So how does the new Opera mobile browser stack up to the competition and its predecessor? Check out the following video with a side-by-side comparison to find out.

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As you can see from the video (and the title of this article), the newest version of Opera is pretty quick. When placed side-by-side with an iPhone 4, an HTC Desire running the latest Opera browser has no trouble outpacing Safari. In some cases the difference is minor, but with full pages, Opera loads several seconds faster. Opera has also improved on the browser's ability to zoom and scroll - both of which happen much faster and more smoothly.

Opera 5.0 on the iPhone looks broken and choppy when placed next to its 5.1 counterpart on the Android. Tabbed browsing is much more enjoyable on 5.1 and the ability to let pages load in a new tab in the background - something Safari won't do - is a nice way to be more efficient.

One of the downsides to Opera Mini is that is doesn't support Flash the way the default Android browser does. When I tested a few Flash features that work in the default browser, Opera was unable to play them. The lack of Flash could be a deal-breaker for some Android users, but regular browsing is much faster than the default browser, which could bridge some of that gap.

As an iPhone user, the future of Opera on the platform seems exciting if the company can bring the speed and snappiness over from Android. The only problem is Apple won't allow users to change the default browser, so clicking links in emails or apps won't automatically launch Opera - a feature Android, on the other hand, does provide.

How Andreessen-Horowitz Picked Its First Cloud Investment

On Monday, the cloud application management service Okta announced that it had secured a $10 million series A investment earlier this year led by Andressen-Horowitz. Okta allows companies to control their users, applications, and data both in the cloud and behind the firewall.

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Following the announcement, Ben Horowitz updated his blog with an explanation for the VC firm's decision to back Okta. It's a notable investment for two reasons: Firstly, Okta's funding marks Andreessen-Horowitz's first investment in the sector. As the firm has backed startups like Foursquare and Zynga, the move is a strong signal. And secondly, Horowitz himself was the founder and former CEO of Loudcloud, one of the original cloud computing companies. "I am," he writes, " considered somewhat of a domain expert in all things 'cloud.'"

As Horowitz notes, "our investment thesis starts, as always, with the entrepreneur." Okta's founding CEO Todd McKinnon ran Salesforce's engineering team, and Horowitz describes him as one of the most astute engineering managers he's ever worked with.

McKinnon and Okta's skill is being used to address what Horowitz calls "the cloud identity problem," a problem that is different in the cloud than it is on-premise. Problems that have long been resolved - access to email, files, printers - remain issues in the cloud.

Horowitz says, "I really like the market, because the cloud identity market will likely become the cloud management market. Given that those current markets combined are between $10B and $20B (depending on what you count), the resulting market will be extremely large."

While the Andreessen-Horowitz backing of Okta bodes well for the startup's success, this positive investor statement is another strong endorsement for the expanding cloud sector as well.

Envolve: A Facebook-Like Chat Room for Your Site

How do you get your users to interact with each other? That's a question Envolve, a new Facebook-like chat feature for websites, is trying to solve. While we have seen a number of similar services in the past, Envolve is one of the best website chat tools we have seen so far. While most sites now give users the ability to comment on blog posts or review products, website chats like Envolve offer a far more interactive experience by allowing users to chat with each other in real time.

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Websites are Lonely Places

As Envolve's marketing materials point out, "websites are lonely places." While we can go to Twitter and Facebook to discuss a site, there is often very little real-time interaction between users on the site itself (except, of course, when site owners use a real-time commenting system like JS-Kit's Echo).

What makes Envolve so interesting, is that it allows you to create numerous topic chat rooms on your site. This, for example, allows you to create one room to answer customer service questions and another that allows users to discuss a specific product or a new feature you just launched. By default, all users remain anonymous, though they can opt to use their real name or even create an Envolve account. The service also features private chats and the ability to block abusive users. Admins can also permanently ban any user.

Pricing

Installing the service is as easy as copying and pasting a few lines of code into your website's HTML template. The company also offers a plugin for Wordpress sites. For small sites, Envolve offers a free plan that supports up to 5 simultaneous users. Paid plans start at $9 per month for up to 10 connected visitors and go up to $99 per month with support for up to 200 concurrent visitors. All of the paid and free accounts also feature real-time visitor statistics and the ability to customize the color of the chat rooms.

Desktop Virtualization: New Release of Oracle's Sun Ray Software Now Available

This morning Oracle announced the latest Sun Ray Software 5 update. Sun Ray Software 5 delivers rich virtual desktop experience to users in a secure and cost-effective way using Oracle's Sun Ray Clients or traditional PCs.

New features include support for Oracle Enterprise Linux, an enhanced virtual desktop client, and a Sun Ray connector for VMware View 4. The new features offer increased efficiency, broader support for heterogeneous environments, improved ease-of-use, enhanced user experience and help lower total cost of ownership.

Read the entire press release.

With this new Sun Ray Software release, and previously announced enhancements and new releases of Oracle Virtual Desktop Infrastructure, Sun Ray 3 Plus Client, and Oracle VM VirtualBox 3.2, Oracle has demonstrated its continued commitment to enhancing and growing desktop virtualization products portfolio acquired from Sun.

Check out Oracle's Virtualization Strategy and product details here.

More later,
Monica

MasterCard Launches Woot-Like iPhone App for Daily Deals

MasterCard recently launched a new mobile application called "MasterCard Marketplace Overwhelming Offers," which delivers daily deals to iPhone users. Despite its mouthful of a name, savvy shoppers planning on purchasing a big-ticket item in the near future may want to keep an eye on this one.

Like the popular Internet retailer Woot (just bought by Amazon), the app provides deeply discounted items, available in limited quantities for a limited time. At 12 p.m. Eastern (GMT - 4:00) every day, a new deal is posted to the mobile app, offering "door-buster" type savings of 50% or more on brand-name products from a network of over 28,000 merchants.

Sponsor

The offers are made available thanks to MasterCard's partnership with e-commerce company Next Jump, which already powers the desktop version of the MasterCard Marketplace website, launched in April.

Some of the past "OO's" (overwhelming offers), as they're called, have included deals like $100 off flights booked via Priceline.com, $50 off anything at TigerDirect.com, $25 off Target merchandise, $100 off Wal-Mart merchandise, $75 off the Barnes & Noble eBook Reader, $50 off digital cameras at Staples, $100 off a Nintendo Wii from Kmart and much more.

How to Play... err... Shop

There's a game-like element to scoring these deals, too. They launch at a given time and sell out fast - sometimes even in seconds, so you have to be quick to win the chance to purchase these items. To get a heads up about what deal is launching when, shoppers can sign up for email alerts that are sent out several hours prior to the OO start time and detail pricing, quantities available and other descriptive info about the product.

And if you're worried that you still might find a better deal by shopping around online, the app has you covered here, too. Instead of purchasing the item immediately from your mobile, you simply "reserve" the item. Of course, to do so, you have to link a MasterCard credit, debit or prepaid card to your account first. You then have up to three days to redeem your reservation.

One important item to note, and a big difference between Woot and this app, is that the discounts you receive are not immediate. Instead, they're provided to you as rebates posted to your MasterCard account. You will actually have to buy the item at full price then wait, usually around two weeks, before the credit is posted. At most, according to the FAQ, this process may take up to 21 days.

MasterCard and M-Commerce

MasterCard seems intent on tapping into the growing m-commerce trend, potentially a $2.2 billion dollar industry by the end of this year according to ABI Research. The Marketplace app is just one of many the company has launched for the device in recent months. It also has MoneySend, a person-to-person mobile payments application, Easy Savings Program, an app that locates nearby discounts from participating merchants, Priceless Picks, an app that lets shoppers share great deals with each other anywhere around the world and an ATM finder application. Unfortunately for Android users, the only app MasterCard has ported to that platform is its one-off app, "Flavours of Shanghai 2010," designed specifically for EXPO 2010.

Natural User Assistance

Everyone should read my UX colleague John Cartan's usableapps piece about the iPad's Natural User Interface at Work. Excellent analysis.

Look at the key messages about the Natural User Interace (NUI):

"A NUI is an interface that lets people use their natural behaviors to interact directly with information. I find that NUIs have four defining characteristics:

1. Direct, natural input
2. Realistic, real-time output
3. Content, not chrome
4. Immediate consequences"

Now, what might that mean for user assistance (UA) on the iPad or other NUI-driven devices. It really is the end for the RTFM and F1 online help model for sure!

For one thing it means leveraging device capabilities as well as natural human inputs. Could we be on the cusp of a UA paradigm where scratching or shaking your head indicates a need for assistance, and where we have the device responding immediately with a concierge telling the user what to do? How about error messages? Perhaps we will see better use of audio, rich content or tactile potential as immediate problem solvers here. The potential for helping users complete interactions naturally is tremendous. Pretty much I think the concept of user assistance will change as radically as the rest of how we think about applications now.

And another point, perhaps consider how the iPad may be a UA device in itself for support analysts, user group and community managers, in-field technicians, implementers, and so on.

Exciting possibilities we'll be researching up on.

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Is This How Twitter Will Offer Friends For Sale?

Twitter has rolled out a number of new monetization models in recent weeks and a change to the search results page tonight may be the next one we'll see. Last Friday Peter Kafka published a report on AllThingsD predicting that Twitter would soon start offering followers to customers, for a price. Now tonight, MG Siegler at TechCrunch spotted a new feature that integrates people search directly into the basic search results page on the site.

Put those two reports together and what do you have? Big clues pointing to a future cost-per-action auction of people search listings for popular topics. Check out some of these example searches below and ask yourself: is this a bidding war waiting to happen?

Update: Twitter sent a pseudo-denial of this theory to TechCrunch!

Sponsor

When Twitter sold a trending topic to the NBA earlier this month, there was a big spike in people tweeting about basketball and Lebron James in particular. Think particular teams would pay for a space in the top results here? How about the NBA itself buying all of them and switching out what appears?

TMZ? I wouldn't be surprised. TMZ-challengers? Perhaps all the more likely.

Talk about direct e-commerce possibilities. If search communicates intent - won't the sales people line up to be introduced as the face to follow regarding popular goods and services? The ROI will be easy to calculate, too.

I think people have assumed that Twitter would monetize search with ads the way Google has - by inserting links to destinations. Twitter is people though - so it makes sense to monetize connection to people and to brands. It would essentially be a way to sell subscriptions to syndicated content, including promotional materials.

It's pretty amazing to think that this social media era may be one where monetization happens when consumers opt-in to receiving commercial communication over time.

We've requested comment from Twitter and will update this post if we hear from the company about our speculation.

See also our scoop of Twitter's @earlybird promotional account (which, by the way, just said it is about to spread its wings soon) and our maybe-scoop of a maybe/maybe not forthcoming Twitter analytics service. Twitter told us there was nothing happening with that analytics news, but then days later announced something that sure looked like an admission of a forthcoming analytics product.

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What an upgrade scenario ...

Do you understand this one here ;-) ? No??

Don't worry :-) I've taken the picture last week when we've run a very special internal training called the "Upgrade Tech Challenge" here in Munich. This was actually the upgrade plan to 11.2 of one of the groups involving a Real Application Testing run with SQL Performance Analyzer (SPA) and taking care about the fallback as well. And as all groups completed their challenge by Friday I'd suppose at least the group itself understood what they wanted to do here ;-)

Freshbooks: $1B Paid Via Online Invoices in Four Months

More and more freelancers and small businesses are taking their invoicing and billing online, according to data released today by FreshBooks, a popular Web-based invoicing service.

According to the data, $1 billion changed hands across the FreshBooks platform between January and early May of this year. In 2009, by comparison, this milestone was not reached until August, which suggests that online invoicing is growing at an accelerated rate

Sponsor

The average invoice size during the first five months of 2010 was $1,677. Of the 23 countries that FreshBooks looked at, the highest average invoice amount were Mexico and Sweden, at $4,669 and $4,423, respectively. Interestingly, the United States, the world's biggest economy, fell to 16th place, with an average invoice amount of $919. Of the countries included in the data set, the least activity was seen in Malaysia, which had an average invoice size of $406.

On average, invoices on FreshBooks were paid in 22.8 days.

[Click to enlarge]