Wednesday, June 20, 2012

OpenWeb 06/21/2012 (a.m.)

  • Good discussion, but it really deserves a more in-depth thrashing.  The basic concept is that a perfect storm of mobility, cloud-computing and HTML5-JavaScript has set the stage for a major, massive shift in application development.  The shift from C++ to Java is now being replaced by a greater shift from Java and C++ to JavaScript-JSON-HTML5. Interesting, but i continue to insist that the greater "Perfect Storm" triggered in 2008, is causing a platform shift from client/server computing to full on, must have "cloud-computing".   There are three major "waves"; platform shifts in the history of computing at work here.  The first wave was "Mainframe computing", otherwise known as server/terminal.  The second wave was that of "client/server" computing, where the Windows desktop eventually came to totally dominate and control the "client" side of the client/server equation. The third wave began with the Internet, and the dominance of the WWW protocols, interfaces, methods and formats.  The Web provides the foundation for the third great Wave of Cloud-Computing. The Perfect Storm of 2008 lit the fuse of the third Wave of computing.  Key to the 2008 Perfect Storm is the world wide financial collapse that put enormous pressure on businesses to cut cost and improve productivity; to do more with less, or die.  The survival maxim quickly became do more with less people - which is the most effective form of "productivity".  The nature of the collapse itself, and the kind of centralized, all powerful bailout-fascists governments that rose during the financial collapse, guaranteed that labor costs would rise dramatically while also being "uncertain".  Think government controlled healthcare. The other aspects of the 2008 Perfect Storm are mobility, HTML5, cloud-computing platform availability, and, the ISO standardization of "tagged" PDF.   The mobility bomb kicked off in late 2007, with the introduction of the Apple iPhone.  No further explanation needed :) The HTML5-Cloud Computing-SOA phenom had been cooking, but needed that financial collapse fuse lit before it could take off.  Needed the mobility too. The other factor is that of tagged PDF standardization and the explosion of the Visual Document productivity phenom that followed.  The key here is that Windows "compound documents" were the primary fuel of the client/server computing era.  The transition to cloud-computing could not take place until these legacy business systems could continue operation with a more effective compound document model.  Tagged PDF blasted open the entire transition model for compound documents functioning as cloud effective "Visual Documents".  Think through the DropBox "sync-share-store" methodology and you'll get this.  Keep in mind, we are at the earliest stages of this great transition from client/server to cloud-computing.  The Visual Document model is transition phase only, but that will last a good twenty years. And that's my two cents! summary: The advent of HTML5 along with the move to mobile and cloud computing are conspiring to cause a major shift in the application development landscape akin to when Java displaced C++ as the major enterprise programming language 15 years ago, according to a top Oracle development executive.

    Tags: Cloud-Computing, Cloud-Productivity-Platform, mobility, Visual-Documents, Visual-Productivity


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

OpenWeb 06/20/2012 (a.m.)

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

    Tags: OpenMobster, Cloud-Computing, Cloud-Productivity-Platform, mobility


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

OpenWeb 06/14/2012 (a.m.)

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

    Tags: MSOffice, Cloud-Productivity, CloudON, QuickOffice


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Tuesday, June 05, 2012

OpenWeb 06/06/2012 (a.m.)

  • Tags: IPv6, ISP, OpenWeb

    • What began as a 24-hour test a year ago will become business as usual on Wednesday as a range of big-name Internet companies permanently switch on the next-generation IPv6 networking technology.

      And now there's no turning back.

      "IPv6 is being enabled and kept on by more than 1,500 Web sites and ISPs in 22 countries," said Arbor Networks, a company that monitors global Internet traffic closely.

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

    Tags: Cloud-Productivity-Platform, amazon, Microsoft-Cloud


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Monday, June 04, 2012

OpenWeb 06/05/2012 (a.m.)

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

    Tags: Cloud-Productivity-Platform, Visual-Productivity, MS-Business-Productivity-Platform, Compat-Interop

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

    Tags: Windows-RT, nvidia, asus, Cloud-Productivity-Platform, video


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Saturday, June 02, 2012

OpenWeb 06/03/2012 (a.m.)

  • Nice article from Scott M. Fulton describing Microsoft's iron fisted lock on government desktop productivity systems and the great transition to a Cloud Productivity Platform.  Keep in mind that in 2005, Massachusetts tried to do the same thing with their SOA effort.  Then Governor Romney put over $1 M into a beta test that produced the now infamous 300 page report written by Sam Hiser.  The details of this test resulted in the even more infamous da Vinci ODF plug-in for Microsoft Office desktops.   The lessons of Massachusetts are simple enough; it's not the formats or office suite applications.  It's the business process!  Conversion of documents not only breaks the document.  It also breaks the embedded "business process". The mystery here is that Microsoft owns the client side of client/server computing.  Compound documents, loaded with intertwined OLE, ODBC, ActiveX, and other embedded protocols and interface dependencies connecting data sources with work flow, are the fuel of these client/server business productivity systems.  Break a compound document and you break the business process.   Even though Massachusetts workers were wonderfully enthusiastic and supportive of an SOA based infrastructure that would include Linux servers and desktops as well as OSS productivity applications, at the end of the day it's all about getting the work done.  Breaking the business process turned out to be a show stopper. Cloud Computing changes all that.  The reason is that the Cloud is rapidly replacing client/server as the target architecture for new productivity developments; including data centers and transaction processing systems.  There are many reasons for the great transition, but IMHO the most important is that the Web combines communications with content, data, and collaborative computing.   Anyone who ever worked with the Microsoft desktop productivity environment knows that the desktop sucks as a communication device.  There was no way to integrate communications with desktop office automation systems where the productivity results were worth the effort.   Cloud computing systems have an incredible productivity advantage here.  Put aside for the moment the amazing efficiency quotient of Cloud Computing, and stop worrying about bandwidth and connectivity issues.  Productivity gains with Cloud Computing are going to go through the roof, making investment decisions in newly written business systems very much worth the effort.   Another lesson from Massachusetts is that the effort to integrate Linux desktops and Open Source office suites into working Windows productivity environments was not worth the cost of having to re write and reinvent existing business processes and systems.  That too changes with the extraordinary productivity dynamics of Cloud Computing. Funny.  Here we are again.  Still wondering if Microsoft's iron grip on business systems can be broken.  The great transition can't be stopped, but will Microsoft swallow hard, bear down and take the lead?  Or will they become road kill on the highway towards awesome productivity?

    Tags: Cloud-Productivity-Platform, Microsoft, Great-Transition, desktop-productivity


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Friday, May 18, 2012

OpenWeb 05/18/2012 (p.m.)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Thursday, May 17, 2012

OpenWeb 05/18/2012 (a.m.)

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

    Tags: no_tag


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenWeb 05/17/2012 (p.m.)

  • Tags: devices, Electric Imp, Web-driven deivices & apps

    • "We've put it in a user-installable module. The user buys the card and just plugs it into any device that has a slot," Fiennes explained." All a developer needs to do is add a socket and a 3-pin Atmel ID chip to their product. That's 75 cents: 30 cents for the ID chip and 45 cents for the socket." This assumes the availability of 3.3 V. "But given that most things you want to control from the Internet are electrical, we think that's reasonable," he said. If not, developers can include a battery.
    • Fiennes demonstrated a power adaptor with an Imp socket. He installed a card and an appropriately labeled block appeared in a browser window. Fiennes plugged in a chain of decorative lights and we clicked on the box on our browser. After clicking, the box text went from "off" to "on." Over Skype, we could see the lights had come on.

      Fiennes emphasized that control need not be manual and could be linked to other Internet apps such as weather reports, or to Electric Imp sensor nodes that monitor conditions such as humidity.

      A second example is an Electric Imp enabled passive infrared sensor. Fiennes demonstrated how it could be programmed to report the time and date of detected motion to a client's Web pages on the Electric Imp server. In turn, those pages could be programmed to send an alarm to a mobile phone. The alarm could also be triggered if no motion was detected, allowing the sensor to serve as a monitor for the elderly in their homes, for example. If there is no activity before 9 a.m., a message is sent to a caregiver.
    • The final example is an Electric Imp washing machine. Machine operation can be made conditional on a number of variables, including the price of electricity. "Every washing machine has microcontroller and that microcontroller has a lot of data," said Fiennes. "That data could be sent back to a washing machine service organization that could call the client up before the washing machine breaks down."
    • The cards will be on sale to developers by the end of June for $25 each and Electric Imp will also supply development kits that include a socket, ID chip and power connection on a small board for about $10. While these are intended for consumer electronics developers Electric Imp is happy to sell them to students and non-professional developers. "Hobbyists can play with it and tell us what they think."

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

OpenWeb 05/17/2012 (a.m.)

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

    Tags: engagio, social-networks

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

    Tags: gVoice, RingCentral, Cloud-Computing, Cloud-Productivity, Cloud-SMB, Great-Transition, InfoGraphic, Graphic

  • Fascinating conversation between Douglas Crockford and Jeremy Geelan. The issue is that XSS - the Cross Site Scripting capabilities of HTML. and "the painful gap" in the HTML5 specification of the itnerface between JavaScript and the browser.I had to use the Evernote Clearly Chrome extension to read this page. Microsoft is running a huge JavaScript advertisement/pointer that totally blocks the page with no way of closing or escaping. Incredible. Clearly was able to knock it out though. Nicely done!The HTML5-XSS problem is very important, especially if your someone like me that sees the HTML+ format (HTML5-CSS3-JSON-JavaScript-SVG/Canvas) as the undisputed Cloud Productivity Platform "compound document" model. The XSS discussion goes right to the heart of matter of creating an HTML compound document in much the same way that a MSOffice Productivity Compound Document worked. The XSS mimics the functionality of of embedded compound document components such as OLE, DDE, ODBC and Scripting. Crack open any client/server business document and it will be found to be loaded with these embeded components.It seems to me that any one of the Cloud Productivity Platform contenders could solve the HTML-XSS problem. I'm thinking Google Apps, Zoho, SalesForce.com, RackSpace and Amazon - with gApps and Zoho clearly leading the charge. Also let me add that RSS and XMP (Jabber), while not normally mentioned with JSON, ought to be considered. Twitter uses RSS to transport and connect data. Jabber is of course a long time favorite of mine.excerpt:The fundamental mistake in HTML5 was one of prioritization. It should have tackled the browser's most important problem first. Once the platform was secured, then shiny new features could be carefully added.There is much that is attractive about HTML5. But ultimately the thing that made the browser into a credible application delivery system was JavaScript, the ultimate workaround tool. There is a painful gap in the specification of the interface between JavaScript and the browser, and that is a source of XSS and other maladies. The responsible course of action was to correct that defect first.That course is still available to us. My recommendation is that we suspend the current HTML5 activity. We start over with a new charter: To quickly and effectively repair the XSS vulnerability. Then we can mine the bloated HTML5 set for features that have high value and which do not introduce new security vulnerabilities.HTML5 has a lot of momentum and appears to be doomed to succeed. I think the wiser course is to get it right first. We have learned the hard way that once an error gets into a web standard, it is really hard to get it out.

    Tags: Douglas-Crawford, HTML5-XSS, XSS, compound-documents


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenWeb 05/16/2012 (p.m.)

  • Nice catch by Jason.  The lesson learned is one we've seen time and again.  excerpt: Web startups are made out of two things: people and code. The people make the code, and the code makes the people rich. Code is like a poem; it has to follow certain structural requirements, and yet out of that structure can come art. But code is art that does something. It is the assembly of something brand new from nothing but an idea. This is the story of a wonderful idea. Something that had never been done before, a moment of change that shaped the Internet we know today. This is the story of Flickr. And how Yahoo bought it and murdered it and screwed itself out of relevance along the way. Do you remember Flickr's tag line? It reads "almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world." It was an epic humble brag, a momentously tongue in cheek understatement. Because until three years ago, of course Flickr was the best photo sharing service in the world. Nothing else could touch it. If you cared about digital photography, or wanted to share photos with friends, you were on Flickr. Yet today, that tagline simply sounds like delusional posturing. The photo service that was once poised to take on the the world has now become an afterthought. Want to share photos on the Web? That's what Facebook is for. Want to look at the pictures your friends are snapping on the go? Fire up Instagram.

    Tags: Flicker, Yahoo


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Friday, May 11, 2012

OpenWeb 05/12/2012 (a.m.)

  • Excellent Hadoop/Hive explanation.  Hat tip to Matt Asay for the link.  I eft a comment on Matt's blog questioning the consequences of the Oracle vs. Google Android lawsuit, and the possible enforcement of the Java API copyright claim against Hadoop/Hive.  Based on this explanation of Hadoop/Hive, i'm wondering if Oracle is making a move to claim the entire era of Big Data Cloud Computing?  To understand why, it's first necessary to read Matt the Hadoople's explanation.   kill shot excerpt: "You've built your Hadoop job, and have successfully processed the data. You've generated some structured output, and that resides on HDFS. Naturally you want to run some reports, so you load your data into a MySQL or an Oracle database. Problem is, the data is large. In fact it's so large that when you try to run a query against the table you've just created, your database begins to cry. If you listen to its sobs, you'll probably hear "I was built to process Megabytes, maybe Gigabytes of data. Not Terabytes. Not Perabytes. That's not my job. I was built in the 80's and 90's, back when floppy drives were used. Just leave me alone". "This is where Hive comes to the rescue. Hive lets you run an SQL statement against structured data stored on HDFS. When you issue an SQL query, it parses it, and translates it into a Java Map/Reduce job, which is then executed on your data. Although Hive does some optimizations, in general it just goes record by record against all your data. This means that it's relatively slow - a typical Hive query takes 5 or 10 minutes to complete, depending on how much data you have. However, that's what makes it effective. Unlike a relational database, you don't waste time on query optimization, adding indexes, etc. Instead, what keeps the processing time down is the fact that the query is run on all machines in your Hadoop cluster, and the scalability is taken care of for you." "Hive is extremely useful in data-warehousing kind of scenarios. You would never use Hive as a database for a web application, because the response time is always in minutes, not seconds. However, for generating huge custom reports, running some really expensive query on year's worth of data, or doing any kind of processing on massive amounts of data, Hive really shines. This is why companies like Oracle and IBM (IBM owns Netezza, a competitor to Oracle) are scared of Hadoop and Hive. Hive makes it possible for companies to easily process massive amounts of data, and processing massive amounts of data is typically how database makers differentiate themselves. And yes, just like the rest of Hadoop ecosystem, Hive is free and open-source." ...........

    Tags: Hadoop_Hive, Java-API, Oracle, Google, Map_Reduce, Cloud, Cloud-Productivity-Platform


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenWeb 05/11/2012 (p.m.)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Tuesday, May 08, 2012

OpenWeb 05/09/2012 (a.m.)

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

    Tags: ge, Cloud-Productivity-Platform, MS-Skydrive, MS-Cloud-Productivity, SkyDrive-Live, iCloud


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Thursday, May 03, 2012

OpenWeb 05/04/2012 (a.m.)

  • Excellent legal piece explaining the options and methods of how software programs use licensed and copyrighted third party libraries through an API. Finally, some clear thinking about Google Android and the Oracle Java Law Suit.
    excerpt:Another option for a developer is to do what Google did when it created Android, and create replacement code libraries that are compatible with the existing code libraries, but which are new copyrighted works. Being "compatible" in this context means that the new libraries are called in the same way that the old libraries are--that is, using the same APIs. But the actual copyrighted code that is being called is a new work. As long as the new developer didn't actually copy code from the original libraries, the new libraries are not infringing. It does not infringe on the copyright of a piece of software to create a new piece of software that works the same way; copyright protects the actual expression (lines of code) but not the functionality of a program. The functionality of a program is protected by patent, or not at all.
    In the Oracle/Google case, no one is arguing that code libraries themselves are not copyrightable. Of course they are and this is why the Google/Oracle dispute has no bearing on the enforceability of the GPL. Instead, the argument is about whether the method of using a code library, the APIs, is subject to a copyright that is independent of the copyright of the code itself. If the argument that APIs are not copyrightable prevails, programs that are created by statically-linking GPL'd code libraries will still be considered derivative works of the code libraries and will still have to be released under the GPL.
    Though irrelevant to the enforceability of the GPL, the Oracle/Google dispute is still interesting. Oracle is claiming that Google, by creating compatible, replacement code libraries that are "called" in the same way as Oracle's code libraries (that is, using the same APIs), infringed on some kind of copyright that inheres in the APIs themselves. This means that Oracle is claiming copyright not on the unique creative expression of its code libraries, but on the functionality of the libraries. Oracle is saying that to make a piece of software that is "API-compatible" with another product, without more, constitutes copyright infringement...................

    Tags: OpenWeb, GPL, Oracle-Google, Java-Android


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Saturday, April 28, 2012

OpenWeb 04/29/2012 (a.m.)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenWeb 04/28/2012 (p.m.)

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

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

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

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

    Andreessen: We knew that you would need some processing to stay on the computer, so we invented JavaScript. And then we also catalyzed Java, which enabled far more sophisticated applications in the network, by building support for Java into the browser. The basic idea, which remains in force today, is that you do some computation on the device, but you want the server application to be in control of that. And the whole process is completely invisible to the user.... The application model of the future is the web application model. The apps will live on the web. Mobile apps on platforms like iOS and Android are a temporary step along the way toward the full mobile web. Now, that temporary step may last for a very long time. Because the networks are still limited. But if you grant me the very big assumption that at some point we will have ubiquitous, high-speed wireless connectivity, then in time everything will end up back in the web model. Because the technology wants it to work that way...... LoudCloud was also called "Silicon Valley Power & Light". Tech companies could use LoudCloud as a utility for their applications. - a software power grid!... I have another theory that I call the missing campus puzzle. When you drive down highway 101 through Silicon Valley, you pass the Oracle campus and then the Google campus and then the Cisco campus. And some people think, wow, they’re so big. But what I think is, I’ve been driving for close to an hour—why haven’t I passed a hundred more campuses? Why is there all this open space?Anderson: What’s your answer?Andreessen: Think about what it has meant to build a primary technology company up until now. In order to harness a large enough market, to attract the right kind of technical talent, to pay them adequately, to grow the company to critical mass—until now that’s only been possible with companies that are providing tools for all sectors, not just specific sectors. Technology has been just a slice of the economy. We’ve been making the building blocks to get us to today, when technology is poised to remake the whole economy.Anderson: What categories are next?Andreessen: The next stops, I believe, are education, financial services, health care, and then ultimately government—the huge swaths of the economy that historically have not been addressable by technology, that haven’t been amenable to the entrance of Silicon Valley-style software companies. But increasingly I think they’re going to be.Anderson: Today, so much software is instantiated in hardware—Apple being a great example. As software “eats the world,” do you think that we’ll see fewer companies like Apple that deliver their revolutionary software in the form of shiny objects?So when we look at Lytro and we look at Jawbone, we see software expressed as hardware—highly specialized hardware that will be hard to clone...... When Milton Friedman was asked about this kind of thing, he said: Human wants and needs are infinite, and so there will always be new industries, there will always be new professions. This is the great sweep of economic history. When the vast majority of the workforce was in agriculture, it was impossible to imagine what all those people would do if they didn’t have agricultural jobs. Then a hundred years later the vast majority of the workforce was in industrial jobs, and we were similarly blind: It was impossible to imagine what workers would do without those jobs. Now the majority are in information jobs. If the computers get smart enough, then what? I’ll tell you: The then what is whatever we invent next.

    Tags: Marc-Andreessen


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Friday, April 13, 2012

OpenWeb 04/13/2012 (p.m.)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

OpenWeb 04/13/2012 (a.m.)

  • Very informative article.  Kudos to Marbux.  Explains how warrantless (illegal) surveillance by Government works, including the un-Constitutional strong arm tactics they use on Internet Service Providers to access your Web communications and activities.  Marbux has it right about the Calyx Project; "Where do i sign up?" Good read! excerpt: Nicholas Merrill is planning to revolutionize online privacy with a concept as simple as it is ingenious: a telecommunications provider designed from its inception to shield its customers from surveillance. Merrill, 39, who previously ran a New York-based Internet provider, told CNET that he's raising funds to launch a national "non-profit telecommunications provider dedicated to privacy, using ubiquitous encryption" that will sell mobile phone service and, for as little as $20 a month, Internet connectivity. The ISP would not merely employ every technological means at its disposal, including encryption and limited logging, to protect its customers. It would also -- and in practice this is likely more important -- challenge government surveillance demands of dubious legality or constitutionality.

    Tags: Calyx-Project, ISP, Nicholas-Merrill, Government-Surveillance, Police-State, OpenWeb

  • The more i learn about the Governments illegal and un-Constitutional surveillance activities, the worse it gets.  As i read this article i couldn't help but wonder why the Government would want to disclose the warrantless activities as evidence in court?  Clearly the Government wants to have their violations of carefully enumerated Constitutional protections of individual rights validated by the nations courts.  Scary stuff. excerpt: A recent court case provides a rare glimpse into how some federal agents deal with encryption: by breaking into a suspect's home or office, implanting keystroke-logging software, and spying on what happens from afar. An agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration persuaded a federal judge to authorize him to sneak into an Escondido, Calif., office believed to be a front for manufacturing the drug MDMA, or Ecstasy. The DEA received permission to copy the hard drives' contents and inject a keystroke logger into the computers. That was necessary, according to DEA Agent Greg Coffey, because the suspects were using PGP and the encrypted Web e-mail service Hushmail.com. Coffey asserted that the DEA needed "real-time and meaningful access" to "monitor the keystrokes" for PGP and Hushmail passphrases. The aggressive surveillance techniques employed by the DEA were part of a case that resulted in a ruling on Friday (PDF) by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which primarily dealt with Internet surveillance through a wiretap conducted on a PacBell (now AT&T) business DSL line used by the defendants.

    Tags: Keystroke-Loggers, Big-Government, Police-State, keylogger


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Monday, April 09, 2012

OpenWeb 04/09/2012 (p.m.)

  • Tags: wireless networking, broadband, mobile devices

    • CSIRO has begun talks with global manufacturers to commercialise microwave technology it says can provide at least 10 Gbps symmetric backhaul services to mobile towers.
    • Microwave transmission is used to link mobile towers back to a carrier’s network where it is physically difficult or economically unviable to run fibre to the tower.

      Where current technology has an upper limit of a gigabit per second to multiple towers over backhaul, the government organisation said it could provide the 10 Gbps symmetric speeds over ranges of up to 50 kilometres.

    • The microwave backhaul project comes as second phase of CSIRO’s ‘Ngara’ project, which previously aimed to use radio spectrum freed up from the switch to digital television to provide residential fixed wireless broadband connections.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Friday, April 06, 2012

OpenWeb 04/06/2012 (p.m.)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Sunday, April 01, 2012

OpenWeb 04/02/2012 (a.m.)

  • Interesting chart describes the massive transition of small and medium sized businesses to the Cloud.  Cloud based eMail and messaging leads the way.  Top two reasons for the great transition?  Cost reduction and productivity improvement. Unfortunately this article fails to describe what this great transition to the Cloud means to legacy productivity systems - most of which are provided and provisioned by Microsoft.  What happens to desktop and workgroup based business systems when the local data and transaction processing server systems are moved to the Cloud?  How are desktop and workgroup systems re written or migrated? Another factor missing from this article is any discussion of what happens to productivity when communications, content and collaborative computing are interoperably entwined throughout the application layer?  We know that the legacy Windows productivity platform seriously lacked communications capabilities.  This fact greatly reduced expected productivity gains.   excerpt: Microsoft commissioned the study of 3,000 small and medium sized businesses in 13 countries. The survey was conducted by Wayland, Mass.-based research firm Edge Strategies. The most commonly used cloud services are email, instant messaging, voice communications, and backup. Edge also looked at SMB cloud plans over the next three years and the same cloud services also are in the IT plans of those embracing the cloud. From this data, it certainly could be argued that SMBs seem to be quick to embrace the cloud in order to enhance communication. It makes sense: in small business, communication is key to ensure rapid growth. The biggest motivators for migration to the cloud among SMBs is to save money (54 percent), followed by increases in productivity. Decision makers also mentioned flexibility as a fairly common response. Of those already using the cloud, 59 percent reported productivity increases as a result. SMB cloud adoption begins to acclerate, study finds http://betanews.com/2012/04/01/smb-cloud-adoption-begins-to-acclerate-study-finds/

    Tags: Cloud-Productivity-Platform, Microsoft-Cloud


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Monday, March 26, 2012

OpenWeb 03/27/2012 (a.m.)

  • Tags: Huawei, broadband, 30Gbps

    • Huawei says it has "recently introduced...Beyond LTE technology, which significantly increases peak rates to 30Gbps - over 20 times faster than existing commercial LTE networks."

      It claims to have achieved this with "key breakthroughs in antenna structure, radio frequency architecture, IF (intermediate frequency) algorithms, and multi-user MIMO (multi-input multi-output).


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Future of the Web 03/25/2012 (a.m.)

  • https://www.facebook.com/events/253224101436264/ [ 25 de MARZO: "PARON EN FACEBOOK, 24 HORAS". CONTRA LA CENSURA EN LA RED. POR LA LIBERTAD DE EXPRESION de Jose Ramon Blasco Artatxo Dados los continuos ataques que sufren lus usuarios de facebook en lo que respecta a la LIBERTAD DE EXPRESION, varios colectivos y usuarios individuales convocan un PARON en facebook de 24 horas como protesta por esas agresiones. DichoPARON comenzaría a las 00.00 horas del día 25 de marzo, finalizando ese mismo día 25 a las 24.00. Se hace un llamamiento para que en esas 24 horas, no se cuelgue nada en la red, y si unos minutos antes como indicaremos al final de esta nota. El hecho de cercenar lla libertad de expresión, se agrava por ser objeto, quienes estan en esta red, de indefesión continua,ya que se dan los bloqueos sin explicación o con ambiguedades...Son "juicios sumarísimos" sin posibilidad de alegaciones ni pliegos de descargo...]

    Tags: Facebook, users, against, censorship, stay, logged, out, till, 00:00h, Monday, 26


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Future of the Web group favorite links are here.

Friday, March 23, 2012

OpenWeb 03/24/2012 (a.m.)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

OpenWeb 03/21/2012 (a.m.)

  • Interesting, but do they have a plan to implement ODBC at the Cloud level?  It's one thing to provide connectivity, exploration and analysis to non Cloud data and transaction servers.  And another to connect the data feeds into next generation compound documents.  Seems to me this is an effective first step, but the value remains elusive.  Left a comment on this page. exerpt: The startup’s offering, which has not been released yet, will connect to data stored in databases as well as the web and other sources, and adds a visual discovery component to make it easy for users to parse through this data and make sense of the information. The beauty of ClearStory is that it allows businesses to analyze internal and publicly available data at the same time and make this data easy for the masses to understand.

    Tags: ge, ClearStory-Data

  • new startup, looking to be a contender in the mobile sync-share-store content sector.  Not sure what separates them from the Dropbox sector though.  big time funding.  Sandhill road.

    Tags: Averail, DropBox


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

OpenWeb 03/20/2012 (p.m.)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Friday, March 16, 2012

OpenWeb 03/17/2012 (a.m.)

  • Tags: timeline, ChronoZoom, Microsoft

    • Imagine a timeline of the universe, complete with high-resolution videos and images, in which you could zoom from a chronology of Egypt’s dynasties and pyramids to the tale of a Japanese-American couple interned in a World War II relocation camp to a discussion of a mass extinction that occurred on Earth 200 million years ago – all in seconds.

      Based on an idea from a University of California, Berkeley, student, ChronoZoom – essentially a zoomable timeline of timelines augmented with multimedia features –- is coming to life.


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

OpenWeb 03/14/2012 (a.m.)

  • Interesting, but lightweight interview with Ray Ozzie.  Look at the productivity comment in particular.  He also mentions "social productivity" as being an aspect of "communications".  My guess is that his new startup, Cocomo, will gear up towards a Cloud Productivity Platform where this new capability of integrated web communications is woven deep into collaborative productivity applications.  With enough juice to blow the legacy Windows - MSOffice Productivity environment out of the water.  We shall see. excerpt: When he joined Microsoft he thought it had a "tremendous history," he said, with great technology assets and people. But it was a company struggling to adjust to changes in the PC and server markets, he said. "I tried my best to communicate with various groups what their purpose in life was," he said. For instance, he tried to convince the Office group that it should focus on selling productivity, as opposed to selling PC-based productivity products, and the Xbox group that it should sell entertainment, not boxes or discs.

    Tags: Ray-Ozzie, Cocomo, Cloud-Productivity-Platform


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Wednesday, March 07, 2012

Monday, February 27, 2012

Future of the Web 02/27/2012 (p.m.)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Future of the Web group favorite links are here.

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Future of the Web 02/16/2012 (p.m.)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Future of the Web group favorite links are here.

Monday, February 13, 2012

OpenWeb 02/14/2012 (a.m.)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.

Saturday, February 04, 2012

OpenWeb 02/05/2012 (a.m.)


Posted from Diigo. The rest of Open Web group favorite links are here.