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We wish you all a happy, healthy and successful new Year!
(from Robert, Michael, Don and Jeff - taking the picture)
I was giving a crash course on blog publishing to my friend Michael, and thought I would kill two birds with one stone by posting my wishes at the same time!
My good friend Loic (GM Europe for Six Apart and MC of Les Blogs) has scored yet another coup: this time he has managed to chat for half an hour with Nicolas Sarkozy, France's Interior Minister (who oversees all Law Enforcement agencies) and reportedly a future presidential candidate. The interview is in French, but the gist of the talk can be found on Loic's english blog or in this BusinessWeek piece.
Loic has been a relentless advocate of blogging in France and in Europe over three years, and has since gone into podcasting and videoblogging. So, Jacques Chirac next :-) ? Joking aside, this might actually have start an alternate communication channel for the forthcoming French presidential campaign.
Chapeau en tout cas (“Hats off, indeed”).
Tags: france
As a disclaimer to this post, I should point out that I am not yet in the “Everything Online” camp in terms of productivity applications, and that’s why I still spend my life in Outlook, Office and a few other key products. Two reasons drive that choice: 1) I am not yet online 100% of the time (though I am looking with envy at one of these EVDO cards) and 2) online services have a tendency of going down a lot these days. Furthermore having had a demo of Office 12 from Scoble last night, I really like the UI work Microsoft has done for this release and am looking forward to testing it at some point (unlike the two or three last revisions of Office). That’s why I have not really reviewed a lot of online office applications, besides RSS aggregators, even if online suites like Zimbra caught my eye when they launched at the Web 2.0 conference.
Anyway, going through the pile of product announcements I received by email over the past “few” weeks, I went for a quick test drive of Zoho Writer – an online word processor which has just gone beta. I had not played with Writely in the past – even after the positive reviews it received from TechCrunch, and therefore can’t compare these two, but I found that Zoho Writer was quite rich functionaly – in the sense that I can’t point out to any limitations in the usage patterns I would be interested in..
My favorite functionality/characteristics:
The only limitation I found was that the user does not seem to have control on the frequency of the auto-save. I would want to be able to set to say 2 mins to make sure that modifications I have made to a document can be saved if I close the browser window Zoho Writer was running in. Alternatively, they could ask user confirmation on these kinds of events.
TechCrunch profiled Zoho Writer when it entered alpha back in September. There is an interesting debate between different companies in the Web 2.0 space claiming foul on one riping off the other – a truism in Web 2.0 land where it is often difficult to differentiate entire classes of services that implement similar functionality.
Brian Benziger, of the Web 2.0 Workgroup, has an exhaustive piece about another Word Processor/Collaboration tool: RallyPoint.
I will need to spend some time on all these tools and figure out which one is the most relevant to my collaboration requirements, as compared to a traditional wiki.
Michael Tanne, the CEO of Wink, briefed me a couple of days ago on the forthcoming public beta that became available tonight around midnight Pacific Time. Wink is a search engine that allows users to bookmark and tag search results sourced from other popular bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, Digg, Slashdot, etc. Wink has an implementation of the concept of leveraging user's gesture of attention - in their case tagging - to thereby altering the order in which results are going to be displayed, and somehow rank results internally, an approach already implemented by services like Digg or Tailrank. Wink also displays Google results below its own, which provides an easy mean to compare Google and Wink on certain queries.
There are a couple of neat features that just got released in this version:
The reason why the del.icio.us import is compelling is that I find this whole idea of using my tags to drive the relevance of my search results interesting. But I don't want to be forced to use a wink tagging system to do that - and that's why I don't use MyWeb even if MyYahoo is my home page. I want to use the tagging system/framework(s) I like, and then have Wink do the work to integrate them.
Furthermore,there aren't that many tags out there and it would take a long time for Wink to get enough tagged information to do something useful/meaningful on the relevance front.
Finally on the synchronization of tag caches, why not ? If for some reason I find a search result through Wink that I want to tag, knowing that my tags will also end up in del.icio.us is a matter of convenience. Hence the neat.
More about Wink's functionality can be found on the Wink blog announcing Obi-wan OB1, and of course, TechCrunch was the first to cover the news.
Wink's business model will most likely be based on some form of advertising, and the usual AdWords are already on the site. What will be interesting to monitor once a critical mass of tags have been amassed is whether Wink has a better yield than “plain Google” thanks to the increased relevance brought by tagging.
Actually, Michael will be one of the participants of the January Search SIG that will cover “Alternate search: tagging, bookmarking, social sharing”.
Tags: wink
Jupiter Research Michael Gartenberg just announced his recent decision to name the ThinkPad X41 Tablet PC “Laptop of the Year”:
It's the first Tablet PC I've used where there is no penalty at all for the Tablet OS feature. It just works as a great notebook and when you need it in Tablet mode (like in that middle seat in coach on the way to CES) it's just there for you. Still no integrated drive and the screen is still XGA. But if you need more, you might want to look at the Z60t. Take the great IBM keyboard, add in a nice DVD burner and a 15“ screen. Toss in a Pentium M and a gig of memory and a 100gb HD and you're talking about a first class system that will keep up with most desktops. The best part is that it's still only 5.5lbs so it's still truly portable.
I recently bought an X41 to replace my Toshiba Portege 3500, threw in an additional 1GB, a docking station and a extended battery (all accessories are listed there) and I must admit that this is an excellent laptop. Almost 6 hours of autonomy with the extended battery (after tweaking the settings to save power), a *GREAT* keyboard, a quality screen, light, small, etc. A great buy!
Tags: tabletpc
How many times has this question been asked to you, most often with genuine interest and sometimes with a hidden notion of “Don't you have anything better to do” ?
Here is Hugh Mc Leod's answer, which sums it all up.
[via Loic]
Before moving to the wonderful world of the consumer Internet, I have built, for about fifteen years, mission critical systems in the financial services market - in which you spend a ton of time (and money) integrating “stuff”: front-office to back-office, buy-side and sell-side, transaction processing to risk management, etc. Originally using FTP or manually-written socket-based message transfers, these integration projects gradually started using Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) frameworks such as Tibco's ActiveEnterprise. These frameworks generally started by offering a messaging layer (a Message Oriented Middleware), on top of which were built gobs of features such as message transformation, rules and workflow management, portals, distribution and supervision frameworks, etc. Back in 1999/2000, a new element was added to the stack: Business Process Management, that was supposed to bring together business analysts and process experts on one side, and developers on the other: analysts would draw process diagrams that would automagically be turned into executable processes that developers could deploy within the enterprise, and across enterprise boundaries.
The concept was interesting, and a number of startups got funded in the nascent market (Lombardi, Fuego, Intalio, Savvion,...) that proved to require more time (and more money) than expected to mature. I became friends with Ismael Ghalimi, the co-Founder of Intalio, and made a small personal investment in their Series B back in 2001. Whilst I am not too sure of the “marked to market” value of that investment, Ismael's insights on the BPM and software stacks at large have been most valuable to me over the years. It is therefore good news that he has decided to start a blog called IT|Redux that covers Business Process Management and a lot of surrounding technology. The latest post describes the “open sourcing” of the Intalio framework, an interesting read:
Intalio has now transformed itself into “The Open Source BPMS Company.” Step One was the acquisition of FiveSight Technologies, the company that brought to market the first open source implementation of the BPEL 2.0 specification. Embedded by major open source projects such as the ServiceMix Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and leading development tools like Sun's Java Studio Enterprise, the FiveSight PXE BPEL 2.0 engine – rebranded Intalio|BPMS – is effectively the most widely deployed BPEL product today. Intalio is planning to continue the development of the BPEL engine under the open source Common Public License, and release its BPMN process modeler and BPEL4People workflow component under similar open source licenses later in 2006. The Intalio|BPMS Open Source Edition includes these three components plus open source ESB, integration adapters, and rule engine. Its customers will be mainly independent software vendors, who will embed the engine and tools into their own end user offerings.
If you have never heard of EAI, no worries: the more modern lingo is ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), etc.
Tags: BPM
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