It has been a long while before I can find a bit time to write something on my blog. Working in an enterprise does not seem too easy for me. Maybe I am a bit over-committed to my work. :)
Monday, 2008-12-15, Copenhagen
Are big companies reducing offshore workers to save the domestic employees? Well, in the financial crisis time, this may happen in certain cases. Offshore software development has been proved to be working well by many cases. And people are aware of all the possible issues and problems to do offshore. Once the benefit is reducing too much, it will be for countries like China, India to re-think their strategy of gaining economy growth on IT development. Well, maybe oursource their work to USA?
Do you like Google Books? Well, it is a good tool based on great ideas. But there are still copyright issues. Recently Google has settled several such issues with Association of American Publishers in order to clear out the way for itself to provide online access to copyrighted books.
Microsoft is releasing parts of its Oslo modeling initiative in its recent Professional Developers Conferences. Seems that IBM rational tools will face more challenges in the near future. MS is quite good at providing friendly toos for developers. Hopefully the Oslo tools will bring more impressive experiences than the IBM tools.
Showing posts with label Tech-News. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tech-News. Show all posts
Monday, December 15, 2008
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
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.
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.
Friday, July 25, 2008
What's new in week 30, 2008
Monday, 2008-07-21, Copenhagen
If we think of what has been for PC developers in the past 20 years, Microsoft is at least one of the major eyehole-attraction vendors (I could think of linux as another potential). Now Google is joining the game. People have been talking about Google deploying dynamic language runtime just like what MS has been doing. Well, it looks really difficult for a start-up developer to choose which way to go.
Friday, 2008-07-25, Copenhagen
Oracle to look at ECM? Not a surprise. The enterprise software market has been experiencing a lot of acquisitions in the past 3 years. ECM is always a big cake for giants to share. Oracle has just announced that it will acquire Skywire Software’s business on application software. The acquisition will improve Oracle’s content management business. Another benefit is that the insurance software of Skywire is also added to Oracle’s insurance business software suite. It seems that SAS will start feeling panic of losing its business in the insurance market.
Microsoft has recently announced its acquisition of a Portugal-based private company MobiComp to enhance its strength in mobile data protection and sharing services technology and business. After Gate’s leave, Microsoft is continuing its movement towards the mobile market.
Oracle is getting more money at the recession world? Well, according to a recent report, Oracle sales and profits actually grew over 20 percent for the 2008 fiscal year, which is the highest growth rate in 10 years. Well, are we in an IT recession time?
Revenge from RealNetworks! Online music store Rhapsody, owned by RealNetworks is launching DRM free downloads. So Apple’s iTune is not the only one controlling the market any more. We will see how RealNetworks approaches consumers’ mobile phones and MP3 players in the near future.
Indian IT services giant Infosys has just expanded its education center in Mysore with upto $380m facility. It seems that outsourcing market is fast growing especially in the recent years and the Indian company is aware of its great potential in this scenario.
AMD has a new CEO! What a great piece of news to Intel’s biggest rival. Well, it is hardly great. We definitely need AMD to keep Intel running on the technology world. Let us just hope the new chief, Meyer, is able to bring the company back to profit after 8 successive quarters of losses.
If we think of what has been for PC developers in the past 20 years, Microsoft is at least one of the major eyehole-attraction vendors (I could think of linux as another potential). Now Google is joining the game. People have been talking about Google deploying dynamic language runtime just like what MS has been doing. Well, it looks really difficult for a start-up developer to choose which way to go.
Friday, 2008-07-25, Copenhagen
Oracle to look at ECM? Not a surprise. The enterprise software market has been experiencing a lot of acquisitions in the past 3 years. ECM is always a big cake for giants to share. Oracle has just announced that it will acquire Skywire Software’s business on application software. The acquisition will improve Oracle’s content management business. Another benefit is that the insurance software of Skywire is also added to Oracle’s insurance business software suite. It seems that SAS will start feeling panic of losing its business in the insurance market.
Microsoft has recently announced its acquisition of a Portugal-based private company MobiComp to enhance its strength in mobile data protection and sharing services technology and business. After Gate’s leave, Microsoft is continuing its movement towards the mobile market.
Oracle is getting more money at the recession world? Well, according to a recent report, Oracle sales and profits actually grew over 20 percent for the 2008 fiscal year, which is the highest growth rate in 10 years. Well, are we in an IT recession time?
Revenge from RealNetworks! Online music store Rhapsody, owned by RealNetworks is launching DRM free downloads. So Apple’s iTune is not the only one controlling the market any more. We will see how RealNetworks approaches consumers’ mobile phones and MP3 players in the near future.
Indian IT services giant Infosys has just expanded its education center in Mysore with upto $380m facility. It seems that outsourcing market is fast growing especially in the recent years and the Indian company is aware of its great potential in this scenario.
AMD has a new CEO! What a great piece of news to Intel’s biggest rival. Well, it is hardly great. We definitely need AMD to keep Intel running on the technology world. Let us just hope the new chief, Meyer, is able to bring the company back to profit after 8 successive quarters of losses.
Friday, July 11, 2008
What's new in week 28, 2008
Thursday, 2008-07-10, Copenhagen
Can iPhone be so popular in the mobile handset market? Well, guess Samsung Instinct is one of those that are trying out challenging this topic. By lowering down the price on 100 USD, it’s really hard to tell if iPhone can lead the market for a long time. Wait a minute, what does Nokia say here?
Microsoft has recently acquired a firm called Navic Networks, which is well into the interactive TV and advertising. Guess Microsoft has moved its strategy to the online/interactive marketing technology a bit. If we remember that online TV is not far away from us, this step may lead us to think that Microsoft is trying to take back the scenario of online advertisement that has been mostly occupies by Google.
Friday, 2008-07-11, Copenhagen
Nokia has the plan to acquire full parts of Symbian and make the platform free. Well, Symbian has been a major mobile platform and is now facing challenges from Microsoft as well as emerging platforms such as Google's Android. It seems that the giant mobile vendor is taking its steps to claim its impact of the market.
We have been hearing about the coming of new iPhone for 1 month. What about other vendors? Samsung and LG are already having their answers in the market. Samsung provides the "Instinct" brand while LG has the Dare, and these two companies are in corporation with other ISPs in the US area to compete iPhone+AT&T package.
Can iPhone be so popular in the mobile handset market? Well, guess Samsung Instinct is one of those that are trying out challenging this topic. By lowering down the price on 100 USD, it’s really hard to tell if iPhone can lead the market for a long time. Wait a minute, what does Nokia say here?
Microsoft has recently acquired a firm called Navic Networks, which is well into the interactive TV and advertising. Guess Microsoft has moved its strategy to the online/interactive marketing technology a bit. If we remember that online TV is not far away from us, this step may lead us to think that Microsoft is trying to take back the scenario of online advertisement that has been mostly occupies by Google.
Friday, 2008-07-11, Copenhagen
Nokia has the plan to acquire full parts of Symbian and make the platform free. Well, Symbian has been a major mobile platform and is now facing challenges from Microsoft as well as emerging platforms such as Google's Android. It seems that the giant mobile vendor is taking its steps to claim its impact of the market.
We have been hearing about the coming of new iPhone for 1 month. What about other vendors? Samsung and LG are already having their answers in the market. Samsung provides the "Instinct" brand while LG has the Dare, and these two companies are in corporation with other ISPs in the US area to compete iPhone+AT&T package.
Monday, June 30, 2008
What's new in week 27, 2008
Monday, 2008-06-30, Copenhagen
Launching location-based services have been a big stream for many tekis and academias. We have not seen a good success of LBS since the idea was born. Now, Nokia just said that it has agreed to buy social networking company Plazes which provides location-aware services that people can use to plan, record, and share social activities. If Nokia is starting to push this idea, what would the ISPs do? Allowing the protocols or not?
Facebook is coming to China. The big social network site has just launched a mainland Chinese version zh-cn.facebook.com. Well, knowing that there have been quite a lot of facebooking sites within China for the past years (and some of them are very successful), let us cross our fingers and see when Facebook will have the same destiny as Ebay.
Wednesday, 2008-07-02, Copenhagen
We have been dreaming of having mobile phone as the only means of media to use on ANYTHING, such as paying a ticket, buying food, reserve an airline ticket, etc. Now with the ISPs and vendors’ help, this is becoming true. T-systems and Nokia started offering mobile ticketing in Germany. This is especially useful for countries like Germany where people tend to stay outside of what’s happening in the world and only trust what TV says.
Skype has been out of our sight for a while. What’s happening after the company has been acquired by EBay? Well, the CEO recently said that Skype has been receiving full help and support from the parent EBay and both are working on integrating Skype with Paypal. We can see that this is a good idea in terms that people can actually negotiate when they are selling or buying things (like what we did 50 years ago in Bazaars). But, isn’t true that after bundling Skype with Paypal, Skype itself is becoming more-or-less a sub-product in the EBay’s brand and that will change people’s image on Skype that it has been a tool independent of any platforms?
Launching location-based services have been a big stream for many tekis and academias. We have not seen a good success of LBS since the idea was born. Now, Nokia just said that it has agreed to buy social networking company Plazes which provides location-aware services that people can use to plan, record, and share social activities. If Nokia is starting to push this idea, what would the ISPs do? Allowing the protocols or not?
Facebook is coming to China. The big social network site has just launched a mainland Chinese version zh-cn.facebook.com. Well, knowing that there have been quite a lot of facebooking sites within China for the past years (and some of them are very successful), let us cross our fingers and see when Facebook will have the same destiny as Ebay.
Wednesday, 2008-07-02, Copenhagen
We have been dreaming of having mobile phone as the only means of media to use on ANYTHING, such as paying a ticket, buying food, reserve an airline ticket, etc. Now with the ISPs and vendors’ help, this is becoming true. T-systems and Nokia started offering mobile ticketing in Germany. This is especially useful for countries like Germany where people tend to stay outside of what’s happening in the world and only trust what TV says.
Skype has been out of our sight for a while. What’s happening after the company has been acquired by EBay? Well, the CEO recently said that Skype has been receiving full help and support from the parent EBay and both are working on integrating Skype with Paypal. We can see that this is a good idea in terms that people can actually negotiate when they are selling or buying things (like what we did 50 years ago in Bazaars). But, isn’t true that after bundling Skype with Paypal, Skype itself is becoming more-or-less a sub-product in the EBay’s brand and that will change people’s image on Skype that it has been a tool independent of any platforms?
Friday, June 27, 2008
What's new in week 26, 2008
Monday, 2008-06-23, Copenhagen
A very funny news, two Belgian developers designed a video game concept called place-to-pee that relies on players hitting sensors in urinals to control the game play. Apparently the great ideas came from the country with best beers because people there have to spend a lot of time in the bath room. The games are for both man and woman. Now bath rooms will be more filled up….
We have seen that Google is challenging MS on collaboration to suites. Now another player joined the game, Adobe. Adobe has recently formally launched its free online collaboration tool suite which includes work processing, file sharing and web conferencing tools. Let’s wait and see how Adobe and get the market already occupied by Google and MS.
Where to receive if you have a BI report to wait while traveling with your mobile? In most cases, if you have BO, MicroStrategy, or Cognos tools in the company, these tools are integrated with Blackberry very well. There are also other possibilities, such as the Windows smart phones, given that your company also uses Microsoft BI tool suites. Another BI vendor Information Builder actually can work with any mobile devices with browser support. It seems that Blackberry is indeed a tool well-integrated with the business world. It will take a very long time for MS to enter the same market with their smart phones.
Tuesday, 2008-06-24, Copenhagen
Is SOA the ultimate way to go for all enterprises? Well, it depends pretty much how you work with services. Sometimes services can be very difficult to design and package. If you package basic functionalities into services, they do not have any business meanings such that it makes the re-usability no sense. If you try to package things into more business oriented services, then it is very possible that many services have overlaps with each other, meaning that they utilizes similar basic functionalities which may bring ripple effects when the performance is tuned according to one specific needs or changes are made to the basic functionalities. Especially in legacy systems, packing legacy applications into services are making the picture more complicated. One can hardly find easy ways to separate hard-coded functionalities according to different business needs.
So, is SOA the right way to go?
Which is the best way to grow for social networking sites like Facebook? Well, open source can be the answer. Facebook has been opening its application development extensions to all developers around the world and people are adding new applications to Facebook more than 100 pieces per day. It is just like there are always a lot of parties or other fun stuff coming up every day. How can facebook lose its audience? Never! Well, Google is also looking at the same initiative and starts to open-sourcing its social network protocols for developers. We’ll wait and see what’s going on the next.
Friday, 2008-06-27, Copenhagen
Here is a news about cloud computing. Data center operator Terremark just launched its “Enterprise Cloud” platform which is a complete managed platform for full-time operation of online business infrastructure. As we can see from this news, hardware and system providers are now thinking of platforms that can support global cloud computing. We can see that there are not only one computing center as the main server, but quite a few centers located globally such that 24/7 cloud computing is definitely not a hardware problem.
A very funny news, two Belgian developers designed a video game concept called place-to-pee that relies on players hitting sensors in urinals to control the game play. Apparently the great ideas came from the country with best beers because people there have to spend a lot of time in the bath room. The games are for both man and woman. Now bath rooms will be more filled up….
We have seen that Google is challenging MS on collaboration to suites. Now another player joined the game, Adobe. Adobe has recently formally launched its free online collaboration tool suite which includes work processing, file sharing and web conferencing tools. Let’s wait and see how Adobe and get the market already occupied by Google and MS.
Where to receive if you have a BI report to wait while traveling with your mobile? In most cases, if you have BO, MicroStrategy, or Cognos tools in the company, these tools are integrated with Blackberry very well. There are also other possibilities, such as the Windows smart phones, given that your company also uses Microsoft BI tool suites. Another BI vendor Information Builder actually can work with any mobile devices with browser support. It seems that Blackberry is indeed a tool well-integrated with the business world. It will take a very long time for MS to enter the same market with their smart phones.
Tuesday, 2008-06-24, Copenhagen
Is SOA the ultimate way to go for all enterprises? Well, it depends pretty much how you work with services. Sometimes services can be very difficult to design and package. If you package basic functionalities into services, they do not have any business meanings such that it makes the re-usability no sense. If you try to package things into more business oriented services, then it is very possible that many services have overlaps with each other, meaning that they utilizes similar basic functionalities which may bring ripple effects when the performance is tuned according to one specific needs or changes are made to the basic functionalities. Especially in legacy systems, packing legacy applications into services are making the picture more complicated. One can hardly find easy ways to separate hard-coded functionalities according to different business needs.
So, is SOA the right way to go?
Which is the best way to grow for social networking sites like Facebook? Well, open source can be the answer. Facebook has been opening its application development extensions to all developers around the world and people are adding new applications to Facebook more than 100 pieces per day. It is just like there are always a lot of parties or other fun stuff coming up every day. How can facebook lose its audience? Never! Well, Google is also looking at the same initiative and starts to open-sourcing its social network protocols for developers. We’ll wait and see what’s going on the next.
Friday, 2008-06-27, Copenhagen
Here is a news about cloud computing. Data center operator Terremark just launched its “Enterprise Cloud” platform which is a complete managed platform for full-time operation of online business infrastructure. As we can see from this news, hardware and system providers are now thinking of platforms that can support global cloud computing. We can see that there are not only one computing center as the main server, but quite a few centers located globally such that 24/7 cloud computing is definitely not a hardware problem.
Friday, June 20, 2008
What's new in week 25, 2008
Friday, 2008-06-20, Copenhagen
Allen System Group, ASG, is in negotiations to have another major acquisition. ASG is one of the largest privately owned software companies in this world. It is no doubt that this acquisition will lead to an improvement in its business process management technology flagship in the market.
High performance computing is definitely a continuously-growing market in the enterprise world. Just like an IDC expert said recently, the HPC market has over 10 billion usd market nowadays and it is still growing over 10 percent per year. One interesting observation is that Microsoft is also having over 1000 developers working at its HPC lab. So even the current market leaders are HP and IBM, or perhaps Sun. Other vendors are eagerly joining the competition.
More enterprise vendors are looking into how their products can have a Google version. For example, BI vendor Panorama has been launching its BI tools on top of Google spreadsheet applications. It seems that Google is also becoming a name of a certain kind of OS.
Allen System Group, ASG, is in negotiations to have another major acquisition. ASG is one of the largest privately owned software companies in this world. It is no doubt that this acquisition will lead to an improvement in its business process management technology flagship in the market.
High performance computing is definitely a continuously-growing market in the enterprise world. Just like an IDC expert said recently, the HPC market has over 10 billion usd market nowadays and it is still growing over 10 percent per year. One interesting observation is that Microsoft is also having over 1000 developers working at its HPC lab. So even the current market leaders are HP and IBM, or perhaps Sun. Other vendors are eagerly joining the competition.
More enterprise vendors are looking into how their products can have a Google version. For example, BI vendor Panorama has been launching its BI tools on top of Google spreadsheet applications. It seems that Google is also becoming a name of a certain kind of OS.
Friday, May 23, 2008
What's new in week 21, 2008
Tuesday, 2008-05-20, Copenhagen
A new competitor to Google on the search engine market? Yes and this may happen everyday. Recently, Powerset has launched a semantic search engine so that users can input natural language to query on stuff. Although not the whole internet content has been indexed by this new engine (only Wikipedia is in the index), using natural language is definitely a good idea to attract users attention.
HP does have a big dream of becoming the next IBM. In a very recently news, we have heard that HP has successfully acquired EDS, a big IT server providers. Services, out-sourcing, and new hardware (as well as software) technology alliance, HP is becoming the great challenger to IBM.
The big idea of cloud computing has been attracting more business people’s mind. The column-based database vendor, Vertica, has joined the cloud with a number of database vendors like EnterpriseDB, MS, Amazon (SimpleDB), and Google (Bigtable).
Friday, 2008-05-23, Copenhagen
Microsoft and Yahoo are in ANOTHER talk after Yahoo’s rejection of MS’s request of deal. Now MS is looking for a chance not totally acquire the searching brand and find out a better way of making things work. Yahoo’s board have received complains after the rejection that they were not considering the deal in a rational way. Let’s just wait and see what Google says about this.
Google is reaching another scenario in the search-engine market. Quite recently the search giant unveiled its health-related website, Google Health. This can be very good news for most people who does not know pretty much on how to find the good medical information on Google. What can make it difficult for Google is that people make just want to find a good medical answer by the search engine instead of going to their doctors. Oh, one more thing, there is a privacy issue if people start to put their health information on their Google Health profiles.
A new competitor to Google on the search engine market? Yes and this may happen everyday. Recently, Powerset has launched a semantic search engine so that users can input natural language to query on stuff. Although not the whole internet content has been indexed by this new engine (only Wikipedia is in the index), using natural language is definitely a good idea to attract users attention.
HP does have a big dream of becoming the next IBM. In a very recently news, we have heard that HP has successfully acquired EDS, a big IT server providers. Services, out-sourcing, and new hardware (as well as software) technology alliance, HP is becoming the great challenger to IBM.
The big idea of cloud computing has been attracting more business people’s mind. The column-based database vendor, Vertica, has joined the cloud with a number of database vendors like EnterpriseDB, MS, Amazon (SimpleDB), and Google (Bigtable).
Friday, 2008-05-23, Copenhagen
Microsoft and Yahoo are in ANOTHER talk after Yahoo’s rejection of MS’s request of deal. Now MS is looking for a chance not totally acquire the searching brand and find out a better way of making things work. Yahoo’s board have received complains after the rejection that they were not considering the deal in a rational way. Let’s just wait and see what Google says about this.
Google is reaching another scenario in the search-engine market. Quite recently the search giant unveiled its health-related website, Google Health. This can be very good news for most people who does not know pretty much on how to find the good medical information on Google. What can make it difficult for Google is that people make just want to find a good medical answer by the search engine instead of going to their doctors. Oh, one more thing, there is a privacy issue if people start to put their health information on their Google Health profiles.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
What's new in week 20, 2008
Wednesday, 2008-05-14, Copenhagen
What can we guess from Microsoft’s failure in acquiring Yahoo? One possible answer is that Microsoft has to try harder on cloud computing to save its success in the enterprise market. Let us just be frankly, MS is not a good player in the online service market while Google was started on this market (and is in the leaders’ dimension now). Given the assumption that online services (ideas like SAAS, Cloud Computing) will be the next market trend for enterprise IT, MS has to make a solid move in order to take the lead in that direction (which is always viewed as a great piece cake). Without Yahoo’s reputation, MS has to find another way to attract more online users’ eyeballs.
The online virus-protection technology is one of the biggest trends in the security market. Given the fact that most of the virus-affections (and/or security breakage) happened through internet protocols, this market is indeed a great place to put innovations. McAfee and Yahoo just announced a beta launch of a new technology, termed SearchScan, to make Yahoo searching much safer by warning of dangerous sites before the user even clicks on them. Wait a minute, isn’t it true that, when you search on a site from Google, there is always a suggestion if the site is believed to contain malicious code? So, there is not just one player in this scenario.
Friday, 2008-05-16, Copenhagen
Quite a few major Internet players, like Microsoft and Yahoo, are trying to put profile-sharing into their service portfolio. The idea is that once a user has an ID and profile information created in one of their websites, the information can just be shared with other sites with one-mouse-click. The convenience is straightforward but many people have the concern that this will have certain amount of privacy leak (just like what happened to FaceBook.com).
Good news for VW fans! Volkswagen and Sanyo are working on a joint venture to deliver battery to be used in hybrid and electric cars. According to their plan, VW aims to start producing cars with the battery by 2012 (which is not far away from us). It’s a bit difficult to imagine how the battery can be, given the fact that VW cars are normally heavier than other competitors.
What can we guess from Microsoft’s failure in acquiring Yahoo? One possible answer is that Microsoft has to try harder on cloud computing to save its success in the enterprise market. Let us just be frankly, MS is not a good player in the online service market while Google was started on this market (and is in the leaders’ dimension now). Given the assumption that online services (ideas like SAAS, Cloud Computing) will be the next market trend for enterprise IT, MS has to make a solid move in order to take the lead in that direction (which is always viewed as a great piece cake). Without Yahoo’s reputation, MS has to find another way to attract more online users’ eyeballs.
The online virus-protection technology is one of the biggest trends in the security market. Given the fact that most of the virus-affections (and/or security breakage) happened through internet protocols, this market is indeed a great place to put innovations. McAfee and Yahoo just announced a beta launch of a new technology, termed SearchScan, to make Yahoo searching much safer by warning of dangerous sites before the user even clicks on them. Wait a minute, isn’t it true that, when you search on a site from Google, there is always a suggestion if the site is believed to contain malicious code? So, there is not just one player in this scenario.
Friday, 2008-05-16, Copenhagen
Quite a few major Internet players, like Microsoft and Yahoo, are trying to put profile-sharing into their service portfolio. The idea is that once a user has an ID and profile information created in one of their websites, the information can just be shared with other sites with one-mouse-click. The convenience is straightforward but many people have the concern that this will have certain amount of privacy leak (just like what happened to FaceBook.com).
Good news for VW fans! Volkswagen and Sanyo are working on a joint venture to deliver battery to be used in hybrid and electric cars. According to their plan, VW aims to start producing cars with the battery by 2012 (which is not far away from us). It’s a bit difficult to imagine how the battery can be, given the fact that VW cars are normally heavier than other competitors.
Friday, May 9, 2008
What's new in week 19, 2008
Monday, 2008-05-05, Copenhagen
A little bit funny but interesting news, is that Intel, Texas Instruments, Panasonic and Infineon have formed an alliance to promote home networks for movies, music and pictures using domestic wiring. One question just out of my mouth, is that, why not “WiFi?” It is true that telephone lines are almost everywhere in a house. But you still need to consider a little extra construction work (like digging the holes, adding a few extra nails). Why not just think about wireless technology?
Friday, 2008-05-09, Copenhagen
WiMax will come to us (I mean US) very soon and hopefully bring new development chances to the awkward economy situation of the country. Intel and Google are two big proponents of WiMax technology. The traditional ISP and telephone companies will start to worry about their existence in the next few years.
A little bit funny but interesting news, is that Intel, Texas Instruments, Panasonic and Infineon have formed an alliance to promote home networks for movies, music and pictures using domestic wiring. One question just out of my mouth, is that, why not “WiFi?” It is true that telephone lines are almost everywhere in a house. But you still need to consider a little extra construction work (like digging the holes, adding a few extra nails). Why not just think about wireless technology?
Friday, 2008-05-09, Copenhagen
WiMax will come to us (I mean US) very soon and hopefully bring new development chances to the awkward economy situation of the country. Intel and Google are two big proponents of WiMax technology. The traditional ISP and telephone companies will start to worry about their existence in the next few years.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
What's new in week 16, 2008
Tuesday, 2008-04-15, Copenhagen
I just read an article by Richard Winter, regarding the large growth of data volume in enterprise data warehouses. Here are my learning points on the article. Why is it that many enterprise vision bigger growth of data volume in the near future? Mostly this is due to the business needs and the better ways (that technology has brought out) to measure, collect, and calculate the data from its most detailed level. For example, most enterprises use to retain 3 years of historical data in the hard disk for doing analysis. Now there are more ones trying to keep 7 years of historical data to be more accurate in the business competition. So the needs for better hardware will never stop because human beings are becoming more ambitions.
Google recently announced the “Google Solutions Marketplace” which is a network that allows customers and partners to find each other and do business. Most products in this market are based on Google’s communication, search, and collaboration products.
Friday, 2008-04-18, Copenhagen
We are getting used to what Google can provide us. But is there another search engine that can be as competitive as Google? Yahoo? Live? or what? If we look at the recent news, that AOL has just acquired Sphere Source, a developer of contextual-search tools to make connections between content from blogs, video, media, photos, and advertisements, it seems that other people are thinking on the same online search market. I can tell that, nor far from the future, AOL will have its new brand of search engine pushed to market with a lot of competitive features.
Is webBI a form of SAAS for BI applications? Well, it depends. WebBI is indeed a way of enabling SAAS and it provides good opportunities for off-shore BI applications and services. But webBI is far from getting adoptted by medium and large enterprises. What stays in-between is the matter of security and regulations.
I just read an article by Richard Winter, regarding the large growth of data volume in enterprise data warehouses. Here are my learning points on the article. Why is it that many enterprise vision bigger growth of data volume in the near future? Mostly this is due to the business needs and the better ways (that technology has brought out) to measure, collect, and calculate the data from its most detailed level. For example, most enterprises use to retain 3 years of historical data in the hard disk for doing analysis. Now there are more ones trying to keep 7 years of historical data to be more accurate in the business competition. So the needs for better hardware will never stop because human beings are becoming more ambitions.
Google recently announced the “Google Solutions Marketplace” which is a network that allows customers and partners to find each other and do business. Most products in this market are based on Google’s communication, search, and collaboration products.
Friday, 2008-04-18, Copenhagen
We are getting used to what Google can provide us. But is there another search engine that can be as competitive as Google? Yahoo? Live? or what? If we look at the recent news, that AOL has just acquired Sphere Source, a developer of contextual-search tools to make connections between content from blogs, video, media, photos, and advertisements, it seems that other people are thinking on the same online search market. I can tell that, nor far from the future, AOL will have its new brand of search engine pushed to market with a lot of competitive features.
Is webBI a form of SAAS for BI applications? Well, it depends. WebBI is indeed a way of enabling SAAS and it provides good opportunities for off-shore BI applications and services. But webBI is far from getting adoptted by medium and large enterprises. What stays in-between is the matter of security and regulations.
Monday, April 7, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, March 24, 2008
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.
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.
Monday, March 17, 2008
What's new in week 12, 2008
Monday, 17-03-2008, Copenhagen
Never heard of 'Kyte.tv?' It is a video streaming service that let users upload video from their mobile phones or web cams to be distributed on the web through Kyte channels. I wonder the difference between Kyte.tv and YouTube. Perhaps Kyte is more focused on the "channels." Which means the company Kyte tries to put their channels connected to more customers and then they are in a position of having a lot of people's focus so that they are able to attracts a lot of business to distribute their content through these channels. YouTube can be used for B2B, B2C, C2C (and C2C is probably the most widely used one). Kyte is more likely to be focused on B2C.
What happens when AOL gets Bebo? Bebo is a social networking site with 40 million users. It has a heavy presence in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand. Bebo can be seen as in the top three most popular social networking sites in the United States behind MySpace and Facebook. They are so many social networking sites. Which ones will always stay successful? From a user's point of view, do I need to have an account in every of these sites to keep up with all my friends (as they may have different belief or taste on social networks and may choose to use different sites)? There are two ways to understand this. First, it may come in the near future that, these networks decide to open to each other in certain ways so that users do not have to remember so many accounts and passwords. It is like you have both ICQ and MSN account and you can talk to your friends in MSN from your ICQ software. Second, there may be a kind of "mediator" sites that help people to connect to all these social networks in a easy way. It is like that there is a software that, once you logon (yes, you may need yet-another-account), it automatically login you into both ICQ and MSN so that you do not feel any difference talking to friends on either world.
Hulu.com, a legal and commercial media service on the web? As claimed, Hulu.com is a legal site where people can watch and share TV shows and full length movies. It is backed by NBC and News Corp and is open only to US users now. The player is developed based on Flash technology so that it can run only multiple platforms. Although there is no charge to use Hulu but users have to watch commercials in a certain frequency. And there are small banners running across the bottom of the screen. It is a successful (well, may be not yet) story for many P2P and online media in the 'dark world' to read.
Google and Postini. It was last summer that Google bought Postini to bring much-needed security to Google Apps. Postini provides message security, archiving, encryption and policy enforcement services for hosted software. Well, we used to received security attacks (I mean virus, spams, etc.) at our PCs. And later there were many attacks towards web servers. When SAAS are becoming more and more popular, I guess the next generation of security attack will be around the hosted applications. And yes, the attack will be more and more clever.
Tuesday, 18-03-2008, Copenhagen
Do we need to migrate to Vista just because it is a newer version of OS? If you are at an enterprise and you think of all you PCs. No! Not now. For many enterprises, such OS upgrade will only happen when the hardware needs to be upgraded. The direct upgrade of OS on an established hardware occurs only if the new OS brings a lot more performance, usability, and reliability benefits, such as from Win95 to Win98. Micrsoft has said it will end mainstream support in April 2009 and extended support in 2014.
MS vs. Google in the online market? I guess the winner will be the customers only. MS recently bought Rapt, a company that makes advertising yield management software for online publishers. If we think of the recent moves from MS to acquire Yahoo, it seems that MS is seriously looking for the next big piece of cake. And Google is definitely uncomfortable with such a giant player on one of its dominant business areas.
What do we expect from 802.11n? Well, four times faster speed then 802.11 a/b/g and longer connection distance? It seems that WiFi is getting closer and closer to our lives. Is there anybody doing medical research can tell me if WiFi is always safe for pregnant women and babies?
Talking about information security of an enterprise, do you think authentication, authorization, and coding is enough? Nowadays there has been an ongoing paradigm shift of the security industry. People are thinking of an information-centric security model. One example can be the prevention of information loss in an enterprise. The master data management (MDM) application can partially solve this issue. But a whole security framework (plus the privacy concerns) is more like an ultimate solution in a while.
MS released a new component library for financial service developers. Good news for developers of the banking and insurance industry! The component library seems to have a tight connection with both the Office tools and the back-end systems such as SQL Server. It seems that this component is trying to replace the IT developers’ efforts into a product so that the business developers can make user of. On the other hand, are there any jobs left for IT developers, or do they have to migrate into the business planet?
Sunday, 23-03-2008, Copenhagen
After a long Easter holiday, here is the latest info that I’ve got from my side.
There are stories that people built a “hot-pluggable architecture” for their BI infrastructure which enables the success of BI across quite a few legacy systems. It seems that this term in the BI and DW area is brought forward mainly by Oracle. The idea of this architecture is to allow an enterprise to mix and match existing and emerging technologies from a range of software vendors. Having a hot-pluggable architecture will allow the enterprise to easily connect and extend the existing heterogeneous systems and maximize the return on current and future IT investments. I think the basis of having such architecture is to enable and enrich the semantic layer of the enterprise information.
A lot of us are talking about cloud computing. Are we ready for an era that we do not have to care about upgrade of our software? It seems that SAAS is a trend with proven cases in industry. But the total era of cloud computing has to wait for a few important factors to grow mature. For example, one important factor is the internet connection availability. And a lot of people are worrying about internet security since it first appears. When the security threats turn their heads on servers and the network, we have to witness enough effort to protect the cloud computing technology against the threats. BTW, IBM has an initiative called “Blue Cloud” following this trend and Google has already established the Google App.
It seems that “Collaboration Tool” is one of the most important technologies of 2008. For a big enterprise, such tool allows employees to brainstorm, analyze, and share work and make their decisions together. Apparently, if the collaboration tool is equipped with unified communication capabilities and supported by various types of hardware such as mobile phones and PDAs, it is going to be the ultimate system that everybody will use.
Never heard of 'Kyte.tv?' It is a video streaming service that let users upload video from their mobile phones or web cams to be distributed on the web through Kyte channels. I wonder the difference between Kyte.tv and YouTube. Perhaps Kyte is more focused on the "channels." Which means the company Kyte tries to put their channels connected to more customers and then they are in a position of having a lot of people's focus so that they are able to attracts a lot of business to distribute their content through these channels. YouTube can be used for B2B, B2C, C2C (and C2C is probably the most widely used one). Kyte is more likely to be focused on B2C.
What happens when AOL gets Bebo? Bebo is a social networking site with 40 million users. It has a heavy presence in the UK, Ireland and New Zealand. Bebo can be seen as in the top three most popular social networking sites in the United States behind MySpace and Facebook. They are so many social networking sites. Which ones will always stay successful? From a user's point of view, do I need to have an account in every of these sites to keep up with all my friends (as they may have different belief or taste on social networks and may choose to use different sites)? There are two ways to understand this. First, it may come in the near future that, these networks decide to open to each other in certain ways so that users do not have to remember so many accounts and passwords. It is like you have both ICQ and MSN account and you can talk to your friends in MSN from your ICQ software. Second, there may be a kind of "mediator" sites that help people to connect to all these social networks in a easy way. It is like that there is a software that, once you logon (yes, you may need yet-another-account), it automatically login you into both ICQ and MSN so that you do not feel any difference talking to friends on either world.
Hulu.com, a legal and commercial media service on the web? As claimed, Hulu.com is a legal site where people can watch and share TV shows and full length movies. It is backed by NBC and News Corp and is open only to US users now. The player is developed based on Flash technology so that it can run only multiple platforms. Although there is no charge to use Hulu but users have to watch commercials in a certain frequency. And there are small banners running across the bottom of the screen. It is a successful (well, may be not yet) story for many P2P and online media in the 'dark world' to read.
Google and Postini. It was last summer that Google bought Postini to bring much-needed security to Google Apps. Postini provides message security, archiving, encryption and policy enforcement services for hosted software. Well, we used to received security attacks (I mean virus, spams, etc.) at our PCs. And later there were many attacks towards web servers. When SAAS are becoming more and more popular, I guess the next generation of security attack will be around the hosted applications. And yes, the attack will be more and more clever.
Tuesday, 18-03-2008, Copenhagen
Do we need to migrate to Vista just because it is a newer version of OS? If you are at an enterprise and you think of all you PCs. No! Not now. For many enterprises, such OS upgrade will only happen when the hardware needs to be upgraded. The direct upgrade of OS on an established hardware occurs only if the new OS brings a lot more performance, usability, and reliability benefits, such as from Win95 to Win98. Micrsoft has said it will end mainstream support in April 2009 and extended support in 2014.
MS vs. Google in the online market? I guess the winner will be the customers only. MS recently bought Rapt, a company that makes advertising yield management software for online publishers. If we think of the recent moves from MS to acquire Yahoo, it seems that MS is seriously looking for the next big piece of cake. And Google is definitely uncomfortable with such a giant player on one of its dominant business areas.
What do we expect from 802.11n? Well, four times faster speed then 802.11 a/b/g and longer connection distance? It seems that WiFi is getting closer and closer to our lives. Is there anybody doing medical research can tell me if WiFi is always safe for pregnant women and babies?
Talking about information security of an enterprise, do you think authentication, authorization, and coding is enough? Nowadays there has been an ongoing paradigm shift of the security industry. People are thinking of an information-centric security model. One example can be the prevention of information loss in an enterprise. The master data management (MDM) application can partially solve this issue. But a whole security framework (plus the privacy concerns) is more like an ultimate solution in a while.
MS released a new component library for financial service developers. Good news for developers of the banking and insurance industry! The component library seems to have a tight connection with both the Office tools and the back-end systems such as SQL Server. It seems that this component is trying to replace the IT developers’ efforts into a product so that the business developers can make user of. On the other hand, are there any jobs left for IT developers, or do they have to migrate into the business planet?
Sunday, 23-03-2008, Copenhagen
After a long Easter holiday, here is the latest info that I’ve got from my side.
There are stories that people built a “hot-pluggable architecture” for their BI infrastructure which enables the success of BI across quite a few legacy systems. It seems that this term in the BI and DW area is brought forward mainly by Oracle. The idea of this architecture is to allow an enterprise to mix and match existing and emerging technologies from a range of software vendors. Having a hot-pluggable architecture will allow the enterprise to easily connect and extend the existing heterogeneous systems and maximize the return on current and future IT investments. I think the basis of having such architecture is to enable and enrich the semantic layer of the enterprise information.
A lot of us are talking about cloud computing. Are we ready for an era that we do not have to care about upgrade of our software? It seems that SAAS is a trend with proven cases in industry. But the total era of cloud computing has to wait for a few important factors to grow mature. For example, one important factor is the internet connection availability. And a lot of people are worrying about internet security since it first appears. When the security threats turn their heads on servers and the network, we have to witness enough effort to protect the cloud computing technology against the threats. BTW, IBM has an initiative called “Blue Cloud” following this trend and Google has already established the Google App.
It seems that “Collaboration Tool” is one of the most important technologies of 2008. For a big enterprise, such tool allows employees to brainstorm, analyze, and share work and make their decisions together. Apparently, if the collaboration tool is equipped with unified communication capabilities and supported by various types of hardware such as mobile phones and PDAs, it is going to be the ultimate system that everybody will use.
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