What's new in week 13, 2008

Monday, 2008-03-24, Copenhagen

Safari is known mostly to Mac users. But it seems that this browser is trying to join the competition between MS IE and Mozilla’s Firefox. The recent release of Safari 3.1 is claimed to be an excellent tool for both MS and Mac users. Most of the foundational work of Safari comes from the WebKit open source project. The key feature of Safari is speed and simplicity. Safari has the best score on the Web Standards Project’s Acid3 test. However, the feature also brings disadvantages to the tool. As compared to Firefox, the extended features of Safari seem poor.

Sun has recently released NetBeans 6.1 IDE with extended features to support Java, C/C++, JavaScript and Ruby. MySQL is more tightly-binded with NetBeans in this new release. It seems that Sun is building a similar IDE platform to the Visual Studio from MS. Hopefully the developers all over the world can benefit from this competition.

IBM has recently introduced a new BI tool, called ProAct. It is a tool to help companies automate customer interaction tasks and boost sales. The software is developed by the IBM India research lab. It does not seem that this tool will be very well integrated with Information Server platform, but rather stay as a standalone system.

Unified threat management (UTM) solutions are quite popular among SMBs. It takes quite a cost to have people that are able to maintain the multiple devices that take care of different aspects of threats, such as firewall, anti-spam, malware detection, web content filter, physical hookups, licenses, services and support. Most SMBs are looking for a unified solution that minimizes the maintenance cost of the different tools.

An IDE for SQL developers? Yes! Embarcadero just shipped PowerSQL, an Eclipse-based SQL development tool. The tool supports Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase, and DB2. It seems that everybody is trying to extend Eclipse to everything (except MS, of course) and people are now seriously looking at the importance of database developers.

Tuesday, 2008-03-25, Copenhagen

Sun has just upgraded its virtualization software, VDI, to support the management of virtual desktop sessions on operation systems like Solaris OS, Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. It seems that, in addition to VMWare and MS, other OS vendors are also looking into the “virtualization” cake.

IBM just launched its first cloud computing center in Europe. The Cloud Computing Center is located in Dublin, Ireland and offers the same types of services and technology as in the Blue Cloud program. In addition, IBM has developed yet-another social networking application for business for cloud computing, called “Idea Factory.” The collaboration platform is targeted for business users inside an enterprise.

BI in Google spreadsheet? Yes! Google just said that it is using the BI software from Panorama, a Toronto-based software company to let users have analytical and reporting tools. Given that Panorama formerly sold its OLAP platform to Microsoft in 1996 (which is then rebranded as SSAS and has been very successful since then), Google’s action with Panorama seems to be a step forward to challenge the market of MS Office and BI platforms.

Wednesday, 2008-03-26, Copenhagen

Blist just went public two days ago and opened its social database application to the internet folks. Any user of Blist can create a database that uses a spread-sheet style front-end. Users create databases, called Blists, to store information for private use and for groups to collaborate. The great idea behind Blist, is that, even you have a social network with a lot of participants, you may not be able to connect to the right person at the right time. The reason is that you do not have enough information on the other folks in the same community. On the other hand, nobody would like to open his/her own information totally public. How do you spread your part of the knowledge/skill/stories/what-ever in the network? The technology can help you. If you keep your data in the database and let a kind of “data-miner” to work on it, when other people are searching for something related to the same stuff, the “data-miner” will be able to “RELATE” you and your stuff to those people. By doing that, we can easily find and use everybody’s expertise in an optimal way. Of course, users of Blist may experience privacy and security problems in the future. But the great idea of collaboration improvement behind this tool is more important and exciting.

Thursday, 2008-03-27, Copenhagen

British Telecom (BT) moving to Asia area? Yes. It is not new information any more. BT has just completed its acquisition of a Singapore-based firm, Frontline Technology. The Singapore-based company is listed on Singapore Exchange and has operations in most countries of south-eastern Asia. BT seems to be quite a bit interested in the growing market in this area.

What to note for Vertica? It is a company that produces RDBMS. Their product is majorly focused on the data warehouse and business intelligence market. The special thing about Vertica RDBMS is that it is a column-based RDBMS (while the traditional ones are row-based). It seems that the company chooses to go for a complete different direction from all the other RDBMS vendors. It may be interesting to know how long this RDBMS will exist (or maybe all the others will disappear).

While we have had so many social networking sites (Facebook, Bebo, LinedIn, hi5, Zorpia, …) in the internet planet, should there be anyone who finally unite or unify these networks? Yes, it is Microsoft. It seems that MS is seriously looking into the big pie of internet and starting to open its bloody mouth. When you can unite these networks, of course you can bring more users (either from these networks or new ones) to the world that you have designed to be. When all the users are so much dependent on your, you can just leave those networks so that they die out soon.

What is Imeem? As described on its website, “imeem is an online community where millions of fans and artists discover new music, videos, and photos, and share their tastes with friends.” What is interesting about this community is that it publishes a lot of OpenAPI so that other developers can use these APIs to create tools for the application. This is a brilliant idea for attracting man power from the open source community. But, wait a minute, how can we make sure that these outside applications do not bring security leaks? Apparently you cannot force out-house developers to following your development model, but then, what is the maintenance cost when you decide to adopt one provided from the outsiders?

Friday, 2008-03-28, Copenhagen

Is PostgreSQL just an open source toy? Definitely not! A lot of people have already been working on different extensions of PostgreSQL and there are software vendors that seriously take the energy from the open source community and utilize the tool in a commercial way. For example, EnterpriseDB, with a successful new round of Series C venture capital financing, has just released Postgres Plus 8.3 and Postgres Plus Advanced Server 8.3. Maybe PostgreSQL will be the only tool left for medium-size vendors to work on after MySQL is acquired by Sun.

Yahoo and Google just started an initiative that developers from both sides will create an open framework for social networks. This is a threat to the big network-owners like MySpace or Facebook. But on the other hand, this is always an ultimate destiny of all different networks. If you stay isolated, you will die our very soon. Everyone needs to connect to the rest of the world.

Microsoft is reaching the VOIP market and focusing on SMBs. Normally it takes a big cost when you move your office from one geographical location to another. I am not saying the cost of hiring someone to move the tables, but the cost of hiring someone who is able to re-configure everything in the new location so that the IT systems work the way it is expected to be. One important part is the VOIP system which used to be very complicated to play with. For SMBs, this is a serious problem. MS just had a new release of its VOIP Response Point phone system which is aimed to strip away the need for expertise with VOIP. The ultimate target is to let even the business users able to install and configure the system without any technical support. I am wondering what will happened when MS links its VOIP part with the rest of the unified communication plan (then there comes another big piece of cake).

Motorola is splitting into two parts, with the handset division being standalone in the future and the rest business stay in the other part. As Motorola is already losing its handset market in the US (from number 2 down to number 3, overtaken by Samsung), to split up may be a very good idea to re-boom the business.

SAS is seriously taking steps to occupy future BI markets. Last week, SAS announced its acquision of Teragram, a provider of multilingual natural language processing technologies and text analytics. At some point in history, people in the BI market were talking about text-based business intelligence and this only seems to be a bit far away from reality. Now SAS are taking its first step towards this trend. I bet other big vendors will follow very soon.