What's new in week 15, 2008

Monday, 2008-04-07, Copenhagen

HP does have a big ambition in the Enterprise Information Management market. It has just announced a new acquisition on the Australia-based company Tower who has been an Enterprise Content Management vendor. HP has already built a “league” of software vendors circling around enterprise information management. It has been competing with IBM on this market for a while. As I believe, it will not be so long that we can see HP acquire Informatica and other BI software vendors

The Dojo foundation has just released its ver 1.1 of the Dojo toolkit. Dojo is an open source DHTML toolkit designed to enable developers to build dynamic capabilities into web pages and other environments.

Wanna browse YouTube videos directly from your inbox? There are people working on social inbox utilities, such as Xobni, Xoopit, and Yahoo. It seems that Google and Microsoft are joining this line very soon.

As I remember, I wrote sometime ago that there have been so many social networking sites and one way to stay with all your friends from different networks is to have another website that does some kind of “integration” work. Check out “plaxo.com.” This is the site I meant.

Tuesday, 2008-04-08, Copenhagen

Here is a very interesting website listing I would like to share, the 25 great geek sites.
Bluesnews.com, theinquirer.net, betanews.com, artstechnica.com, osnews.com, Beyond3D.com, hardocp.com, techreport.com, anandtech.com, mvktech.net, Silentpcreview.com, guru3d.com, hacknmod.com, tech-forums.net/pc, driverheaven.net/forum.php, hardforum.com, avsforum.com, rockpapershotgun.com, joelonsoftware.com, gamepolitics.com, engadget.com, codinghorror.com, thinkgeek.com, xkcd.com, mikeshardware.co.uk.

Yahoo is preparing on an Ad management platform for customers to buy and sell ads online. Online Ads have been a big trend for bringing new business models to the market. After Google’s success (well, I mean the success of getting so much focus and investment), most websites are seeking new models in the online market. Despite its recent acquisition actions with Microsoft, Yahoo is looking forward to this new piece of cake.

Thursday, 2008-04-10, Copenhagen

Microsoft is also quite open to the open source world. Quite recently, Microsoft has started to make available the technical docs for the protocols built into Office 2007 and Exchange Server 2007. The protocols will let developers understand and be able to write programs using the connection protocols among tools in the MS Office tool suite, e.g., SharePoint 2007, Outlook, etc.

Google is now starting to host web applications, like what Amazon has been doing. It seems that more and more vendors are focusing on cloud computing. When will Microsoft start to do the same thing? I do not believe it, unless MS can acquire Yahoo or MSN has a major strategy change.

Licensed online video? Yes, ModernFeed.com has started to aggregate many licensed content on the web. From a programmer’s point of view, ModernFeed is just collecting the “pointers” to all kinds of video sources, rather than hijacking it. It will be interesting to know how they can make an online video show as smooth as possible without thinking about P2P technologies.

It seems that OOXML, the MS standard, has been approved by ISO. What does it mean for most of the enterprise Office users? Primarily it is about transforming old files into the new format. I would agree that XML is the best tool for standardizing information, but does it take more space on my disk?

Saturday, 2008-04-12, Copenhagen

Many of us watch online videos and we are aware of the license problem. Is it possible to save licensed online videos and browse them later in an offline mode? It's a matter of protection technique. Adobe just annouced the version 1.0 of Adobe Media Player. How can another media player make sense to any users? The answer is that one of the major feature of this media player is that it can let users to download licensed online videos and watch them in offline mode and it is still legal to do so? I think one major effort put into this players, is the way to avoid users to abuse the downloaded video content. No wonder a lot of hackers will try to crack down the tool. So let us just cross our figures and wait-to-see.

Barcelona is available now. I mean, the AMD quad-core Opteron processor. Now it's Intel's turn to make the quad-core or multi-core chipsets.

Here's an interesting list of websites, the 10 sites for cheap flights (may be for US only) (http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/0,1206,l=226215&s=25306&a=226221,00.asp)
They are: Airfarewatchdog.com, BookingBuddy, Farecase, Hotwire, InsideTrip, Kayak, Mobissimo, SeatGuru, SideStep, Yapta, (and a bonus) Virgin Air Charter.