What's new in week 37, 2008

Wednesday, 2008-09-10, Copenhagen

HP is quite serious about its competition with IBM and MS on all types of software and hardware systems. It has recently launched project and portfolio management tools into its business product suite. Seems that enterprises now have quite a few (more than 3) choices to go when only giant vendors are considered.

Seems that Google is becoming a place where people meet and discuss their ambitions and leave and create their own company and sell their company with a big number. One example is the new engine called Cuil ("cool" as it is pronounced) which is designed by former Google members. This new search engine is claimed to provide even more information with less hardware spending. Let's see how this start-up goes and when Google will acquire it.

Friday, 2008-09-12, Copenhagen

Sun is definitely joining the cloud computing team. It recently annouced the preview release of JavaFX, which is its rich client platform for building rich internet applications (RIAs). After Microsoft and Adobe, Sun is becoming another vendor that provides the basic programming facilities for building cloud computing applications.

Look out! Amazon is crazy about getting people to use its cloud computing web services. Long after its Elastic Cloud and Simple Storage Service offers, it launches the Mechanical Turk, which is a website that let non-programmers to create basic tasks of certain web services with requirements and let other people (such as a part-time programmer) to finish the rest of the work.

Sunday, 2008-09-14, Copenhagen

When enterprises grow bigger, it become more and more important to have better understanding of its IT architecture and assets. Meta recently annouced a road-mapping tool, called "Mega IT Planning," to help enterprises to manage IT architecture. Looks like that many architects will be interested in the tool.

The Web-collaboration-tool market is far away from being mature. Google and Microsoft SharePoint are among the leading ones. Central Desktop is another software provider who tries to compete with the giants in this market. As claimed by its CEO, Central Desktop provides more collaboration functionalities than Google Apps while requires less resource than SharePoint. It seems that Central Desktop is trying to find a balance between the "thin" functionalities of Google App and the "fat" requirements of SharePoint.