ReadWriteWeb is a partner with Defrag, a conference about web innovation. Defrag's Eric Norlin has lately been blogging about enterprises and organizations starting to move beyond mere 'cost containment' (although that's still a big driver) and into using web technologies to boost productivity. Eric points out that "taming the data" is one of the challenges of this shift, because there is so much information online which workers need to process. And it's not just taming the data, but gleaning 'intelligence' from it. He mentions a number of buzzwords: enterprise 2.0, semantic web, business intelligence. Eric's main point is that this space is wide open for innovation - going beyond Webex, social networks and so on.
Part of the problem in the enterprise/business market is the predominance of big, bulky software from large IT vendors such as Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and Oracle. Although most of those companies are slowly evolving into offering web-based software (Cisco owns Webex for example), it tends to be slow progress from all the bigcos except for Google. But nowadays we're seeing startups making a significant impact in the enterprise. There are two main ways this is happening...
If I apply some wacky new type of license to my creative work, is it going to hold up in court if a conflict comes down to that?
According to some participants, a key US court yesterday made a decision in favor of free, open intellectual property licenses like Creative Commons, though the details of the decision are complicated.
Platforms like WordPress and Movable Type democratized the process of self-publishing. With these tools, everyone could be a publisher and it didn't require advanced technical expertise to do so. Now, the next revolution for publishing is to bring that same ease of creation to the process of building social networks. With Six Apart's recent release of Movable Type 4.2, that revolution has begun. The new release provides DIY tools for building your own social networking platform which includes member profiles, forums, friending capabilities, rating of content, and more. WordPress isn't too far behind, either - a new platform called BuddyPress, is being built on the WordPress core. Is this the future of blogging? Or is this the future of web publishing altogether?
Wuala puts a new twist on cloud storage. While typical cloud storage services move your data onto servers managed by the provider, Wuala also uses disk space on other members' computers. Files are encrypted on the user's own machine and the chopped up into little pieces and uploaded to Wuala's servers, as well as numerous other users' computers (Wuala calls this 'social grid storage') to provide a redundant storage solution. Wuala's local client is written in Java and runs on OSX, Windows, and Linux.
Unit Testing is
one of the pillars of Agile Software Development. First introduced by Kent Beck, unit testing has found its way into
the hearts and systems of many organizations. Unit tests help engineers reduce the number of bugs, hours spent on debugging, and
contribute to healthier, more stable software.
In this post we look at a dozen unit testing tips that software engineers can apply, regardless of their programming language or environment.
When Pageonce unveiled their first version of their iOnce iPhone app, it became an instant success. Within 10 days it was ranked in the top three applications in the Productivity category, and overall it was ranked in the top 50 out of all the free iPhone applications. What made this app so appealing? Simple: it's a one-stop-shop for managing all of your online accounts - finance, utilities, travel, shopping, email, and social networks. Now, the latest version of the app, iOnce 2.0, has arrived and it's even better. The new app offers improved security features that users have been clamoring for as well as the ability to add accounts directly from the app itself.
Staff researcher David François Huynh has created an interesting tool for browsing semantic database Freebase, called Freebase Parallax. Written up by ZDNet's Oliver Marks, the video Huynh recorded demonstrating Parallax (below) will knock your socks off.
Unfortunately, actually using Parallax demonstrates just how far from solid Freebase, one of the semantic web's poster children, really is. The idea is to allow you to apply multiple filters for your searches and embed live charts in a blog. It's a beautiful idea, check out the video.
Like a lot of people, I had my problems with Google Apps this week. Sure, Google "feels my pain" but they also lost my confidence. And confidence is a delicate thing. What crashed for me was Spreadsheet. That has always been the weakest component for Google and the strongest for Microsoft. Excel rocks, its just a tad behind the times on collaboration.
But in this post we explain how Google could still win the spreadsheet game by buying eXpress Corp.
The Google Reader team just announced that it has implemented more granular controls for who you share items with, including the ability to manage a list of friends within Google Reader that is kept separate from your Google Talk contacts. When Google first announced that Shared Items would now automatically appear in the Google Reader of all your Google Chat contacts, a lot of people were quite upset about the lack of control over who they were sharing with and the possible privacy implications of this.
Want to go to fewer meetings at work? By making group decision making faster, easier and more accountable, new app Zapproved may help you avoid hours of painful face to face drudgery or endless email loose ends and get back to work. Zapproved is a lightweight hosted decision making service, it's essentially like Evite for approval processes.
Freshly launched this week, the four person company has a little bit of usability work it could do on its product and the possibilities for additional user interfaces (Blackberry, IM, etc) are many - but the service already looks quite useful.
