This article was a joint collaboration between chartered accountant Jonathan Bradford and computer scientist Ian Leader. They blog at Jay Eye Sea.
In September Google added a presentation application to its Google Apps suite, thus creating an online office version of the
"holy trinity": word processor, spreadsheet and presentation tool. So what's next for Google Apps? What might be the next killer app? We think it will be an accounting system and in this article we will outline why. There are strong benefits to an online accounting service in Google Apps – both to users and
to the targeted advertising-driven business of Google. [Ed's note: we are also running a poll at the end of the article]
To date, there have been a number of online accounting systems developed - e.g. Mint and Xero - which
showcase some of the obvious benefits of online accounting:
Adobe is announcing today the release of BlazeDS, an open source version of their server side remoting and messaging
technologies that were previously only available in the LifeCycle Data Services ES package. Adobe is also publishing the Action Message Format (AMF) protocol specification.
Right now, the technologies included in BlazeDS are targeted at enterprises using Java via the LifeCycle product family. Adobe hopes that by opening the source code with BlazeDS and by publishing the AMF spec, developers will be able to use Adobe's remoting and messaging technologies with non-Java backends, such as PHP and Ruby.
"The combination of BlazeDS with Flex and AIR helps reduce the time it takes for developers to build responsive and highly innovative RIAs that deliver rich, dynamic, branded content and applications across all major browsers and operating systems," said David Mendels, senior vice president, Business Productivity Business Unit at Adobe in a press release. "Contributing these technologies, including the AMF specification, to the open source community opens them up for other non-Java backends, helping to rapidly advance this important RIA feature set."
David Lenehan was at LeWeb3 in Paris, on behalf of Read/WriteWeb. Here is his overview.
The LeWeb3 Conference kicked off yesterday morning in Paris and has just finished up this evening. Our host Loic Le Meur of Seesmic opened the event with much fanfare, flashing lights and European techno music. He acknowledged the criticisms of last years event, and promised that they learned from the feedback they received. The conference was split between 3 large buildings covering the keynotes and panels in one, a startup stage in another one, and a large comfortable networking space in another. This is one of the better conferences I have been to in recent years. Wifi worked for the most part, there was very healthy amount of new startups demoing, the VCs and angels were out in force, and the keynotes - although too relaxed and light at times - were mostly interesting and engaging. Pretty much 100% of the conference is going to be available for free to watch online soon here, so check out the videos if there is anything you would like to have seen. Here are a few of the highlights...
Image: cwmac
Back in October Read/WriteWeb got the scoop that social network Bebo was about to announce a developer platform. This was pre-OpenSocial, which Bebo joined at the beginning of November. Then in mid November Bebo announced Open Media, which we described as not terribly open and "like a white listing of professionally produced, big media content." [see also last100's take on it] At that time there weren't many details on the Bebo platform.
Today Bebo has fully lifted the lid on their platform plans - and surprisingly it has ended up aligning itself to the Facebook platform. Surprising, because previously it had declared itself a partner in Google's competing OpenSocial.
The Inside Facebook blog reports that the Bebo platform is almost identical to Facebook's - it is nearly 100% compatible, in that the APIs, markup language, and query language are all the same. The Bebo Platform is launching tonight with 40 application developer partners and media partners such as NBC Universal and Flixster.
A post today on the official Facebook blog notes that Facebook is opening up its platform architecture to other social networks. So this move by Bebo/Facebook is certainly a move against Google's OpenSocial. Although it looks like Bebo may be trying to have its cake and eat it too, by declaring support for both Facebook and OpenSocial.
In this post, we look at three examples of innovation that have been around for a while, but are just now hitting the mainstream: Image recognition, touch screens, and speech recognition. We also look at biometrics - a technology which is likely to be next in line to infiltrate our lives.
A long time generally passes between the creation of any successful technology and its wide, mainstream adoption. Ideas only evolve into solutions over time. What starts with innovation in startups and research labs gets refined by larger companies, is simplified and perfected and only years later goes mainstream. My old boss used to say: "Good things take time," and he was right.
In this day and age we have been spoiled with innovation. We mistakenly think that it is enough to just think of an idea and the rest is just technology. Not so. The ideas are just the beginning of a long journey. It is precisely because the ideas need time to evolve into solutions that we need the Digestion Phase. This is the time when we reflect on innovative ideas and decide how they fit together into the bigger picture. We begin to iterate on those ideas, shape them, clean them up, and make them ready for prime time.
On the one hand she rails against corporate greed. On the other hand, Arianna Huffington, one of the web's most prominent political bloggers, refuses to pay the legion of citizen bloggers that have made her site (The Huffington Post) the 5th most linked to blog on the web according to Technorati. Or, so argues Froma Harrop in a biting editorial in the Providence Journal.
"Like most political blogs, the 'news' on The Huffington Post is merely links to newspapers, TV stations and other organizations that actually pay their creators. Without the serf-written blogs, the site would be worth next to zero.
Being very left, The Huffington Post provides a daily damnation of top-hatted capitalists oppressing the toiling masses. Imagine obtaining such content from slave labor. Business schools will be studying this example for years."
Somewhere in Harrop's sarcasm-infused diatribe she has a point -- or she misses one completely about user generated content. It's hard to tell. The Huffington Post is hardly the first site to build a business around content created by uncompensated users. YouTube springs to mind. MySpace springs to mind. Epinions, Digg, TripAdvisor, DailyKos, etc. Heck, even the very newspaper Harrop sits on the editorial board of prints letters to the editor (or, user generated content) without payment to the writer.
Last February Cisco, the venerable provider of Internet backbone hardware, got its hands wet in the social networking scene by acquiring Five Across, a provider of enterprise social networking software. A little under a month later, the acquisition bug struck again as Cisco purchased the assets of social community site Tribe.net. The acquisitions seemed a little odd to some folks at the time. Matt Marshall of VentureBeat started off a post about the Five Across acquisition by asking, "What has the world come to?"
Ultimately, as Marshall concluded, Cisco saw social networking as a wider trend that will drive a lot of Internet traffic -- over their routers, if they played their cards right. So the push into the social networking space made sense and today Cisco's social strategy comes into focus with Infoworld reporting that Cisco will introduce its Entertainment Operating System (EOS) platform next year.
Today Six Apart is officially making its Movable Type publishing platform open source, just under four months after the launch of Movable Type 4 and six months after the open sourcing announcement in June. This means that as of today, MT users can freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for any purpose they choose.
Importantly, it also means that Six Apart has finally removed the one major advantage that Wordpress has had over Movable Type - that it is open source. I'm sure representatives of both companies will argue that they still have advantages over the other (in fact, they usually do so in the Read/WriteWeb comments!). But given Movable Type's history - MT was once the darling of early adopter bloggers, but when Six Apart introduced licensing fees the tide quickly turned towards Wordpress - the open sourcing is both a necessary and welcome move by Six Apart.
MTOS (Movable Type Open Source) is an open source project that will consist of a GPL-licensed version of Movable Type 4.0 and resources for the community of Movable Type developers. It was originally slated for Q3 release, but was pushed back to Q4 - today to be exact. The main points:
Web Office vendor Zoho continues its rapid pace of product upgrades and new releases, with the next version of Zoho Show - its browser-based presentations software. The app has a brand new user interface and a bunch of new features.
The UI changes focus mainly on improving the editing of presentations, which Zoho says now "matches that of its desktop counterparts" (by which we assume it means Microsoft Powerpoint). Also importing presentations has been upgraded. The video embedded below gives a good overview of the changes.
I'm not a big user of Powerpoint, but in my tests I was impressed by the slickness of the Ajax. I was told that a lot of work went into that, especially for compatibility with VML (IE browser) and SVG (Firefox and others).
In 2001, spam accounted for an estimated 5% of our email. In 2007, it clogs our inboxes to the tune of 90-95% of all email sent, according to a new report released today by Barracuda Networks. Barracuda, a leading vendor of spam filtering technology, based their analysis on the over 1 billion emails that the company's software scans each day. The year-over-year increase appears to indicate the failure of the US federal CAN-SPAM Act, which was passed in 2004 when spam only accounted for about 70% of all email sent.
Last month we reported on a study from research firm IDC that predicted that 2007 would be the first time that spam out numbered legit email. Our readers didn't think that sounded right: surely spam outnumbered legit email years ago. "Spam sure as hell surpassed legit emails in my inbox -- years ago. Mine. My mom, dad, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, every single friend I've talked to about it, my cat and dog, Boobo my hamster, everyone..." wrote one commenter.
