Conundrum

Security Lessons Learned From The Diaspora Launch: MicroISV on a Shoestring The team is manifestly out of their depth with regards to web application security, and it is almost certainly impossible for them to gather the required expertise and still hit their timetable for public release in a month. You might believe in the powers of OSS to gather experts (or at least folks who have shipped a Rails app, like myself) to Diaspora’s banner and ferret out all the issues. You might also believe in magic code-fixing fairies. Personally, I’d be praying for the fairies because if Diaspora is dependent on the OSS community their users are screwed. There are, almost certainly, exploits as severe as the above ones left in the app, and there almost certainly will be zero-day attacks by hackers who would like to make the headline news. “Facebook Competitor Diaspora Launches; All Users Data Compromised Immediately” makes for a smashing headline in the New York Times, wouldn’t you say? Nice post. Alt

Today, a friend shared an interesting article. Titled " The Man Who Said No to Wal-Mart ", its essence was the story how Jim Wier, CEO of the lawn-equipment company Simplicity stopped selling Snapper branded lawn mowers via Wal-Mart. "In 2002, Jim Wier's company, Simplicity, was buying Snapper, a complementary company with a 50-year heritage of making high-quality residential and commercial lawn equipment. Wier had studied his new acquisition enough to conclude that continuing to sell Snapper mowers through Wal-Mart stores was, as he put it, "incompatible with our strategy. And I felt I owed them a visit to tell them why we weren't going to continue to sell to them." Selling Snapper lawn mowers at Wal-Mart wasn't just incompatible with Snapper's future--Wier thought it was hazardous to Snapper's health. Snapper is known in the outdoor-equipment business not for huge volume but for quality, reliability, durability. A well-maintained Snapper l

   +  "Shazam is an application which you can use to analyse/match music. When you install it on your phone, and hold the microphone to some music for about 20 to 30 seconds, it will tell you which song it is. When I first used it it gave me a magical feeling. “How did it do that!?”. And even today, after using it a lot, it still has a bit of magical feel to it. Wouldn’t it be great if we can program something of our own that gives that same feeling? That was my goal for the past weekend." Read the complete post here A nice experiment. The author got into trouble for patent infringement. But that's expected I guess :)

The Pants That Stalked Me on the Web - Advertising Age - DigitalNext "I surfed over to my favorite apparel website, Zappos, now a part of Amazon. After a few clicks, Zappos' recommendation engine went to work and started offering me the selections that people who looked at the same shorts I did ultimately bought -- a cool idea and a feature that has been useful to me in the past. Then, I abandoned the search and did something else. That's when the weirdness started. In the five days since, those recommendations have been appearing just about everywhere I've been on the web, including MSNBC, Salon, CNN.com and The Guardian. The ad scrolls through my Zappos recommendations: Hurley, Converse by John Varvatos, Quicksilver, Rip Curl, Volcom. Whatever. At this point I've started to actually think I never really have to go back to Zappos to buy the shorts -- no need, they're following me." That story might sound creepy at first. But I find the technology both fas

What Big Brands Are Spending on Google - Advertising Age - Digital "The data obtained by Ad Age includes huge brands such as GM, Walt Disney, Eastman Kodak and BMW, which appear to have spent less than $500,000 in June. Tech rival Apple spent just under $1 million on search during the month, as did chip maker Intel. Among Google's biggest spenders are businesses that depend on search traffic, including those that resell AdWords or simply buy Google traffic to resell to their own advertisers, including Hungry Machine, which does business under the name Living Social, which spent $2.4 million in June, and Yellowpages.com, which spent $1.2 million. As a snapshot, it's also remarkable that Google's biggest advertisers, big monthly spenders like AT&T, Apollo Group and Amazon, individually accounted for less than 1% of Google's U.S. revenue in June. The top 10 advertisers in the document collectively accounted for just 5% of Google's U.S. revenue during the month

Pixar's RenderMan® | Showcase "The challenge of shading food for Ratatouille was to work with a stylized look that fits into our world, yet is still readable and recognizable as something appealing to eat. We, as humans, have a built-in sensory system to know what looks edible to our eyes and stomach. Finding that acceptable (and tasty) appearence was the main focus. To achieve this, we used subtle illumination techniques that became a general approach for a variety of objects. Here we will study a brief technical overview, followed by descriptions of different concepts, techniques and systems to achieve the look." I've been reading iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business for a while now.  Well, with work, studies and other stuff, it's hard to finish reading a book in a single sitting these days, hence the "for-a-while". I'm almost at the end of Part Two of the book and kept coming across a software called RenderMan. Rend

IT in the Age of the Empowered Employee - Ted Schadler - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review "Incremental innovation and process improvements have always come from those closest to the problem. It's the basis of kaizen, a system where employees continually improve manufacturing processes. It's also a founding principle of Six Sigma tap employees' relentless, incremental quality improvements. The same is true in the way employees are harnessing consumer technologies social, mobile, video, and cloud. They're improving how they do their jobs and solving your customer and business problems. And it's not just a few employees; it's a critical mass of employees. In a survey of more than 4,000 U.S. information workers, we found that 37% are using do-it-yourself technologies without IT's permission. LinkedIn, Google Docs, Smartsheet.com, Facebook, iPads, YouTube, Dropbox, Flipboard the list is long and growing. Many of these scenarios are do-it-yourself p

Here's that analysis we promised of what happened yesterday traffic-wise (tldr: everything went better than expected). via reddit.com We had some interesting traffic yesterday. Usually that would mean it's time for a technobabbly post-mortem about which part of our infrastructure failed and caused the site to go down for three hours. However, something strange happened this time: the site didn't go down (knock on wood). So I guess we're going to have to set aside tradition and instead make a, um.. "postpartem" blog post about how things bent but did not break. TL;DR: Money from reddit gold users went to defence against a massive attack of Digg users. And not only reddit managed to overcome the attack, it also converted them to the better religion! Plus, they have reandomly put games in their advertisement boxes, which makes users turn AdBlock off for reddit. As those who follow me on Twitter know, I created an account at reddit too, joining the flood of di

From the YouTube description of this clip ... Stanley Hainsworth has been creative director at Nike, Lego, and Starbucks—all brands that have become iconic through good design. He just finished designing the new Gatorade bottle, too. Hainsworth clearly has a remarkable eye for style, but he insists that the key to creating a brand that attracts fans, that people love, is telling the company's story. Hainsworth says that companies like Apple have a persona. "You could describe what Apple is as a person, because of the personality they've created," he explains. "So when we work with tech startups, the first thing we have to figure out is their story—what sets them apart in the marketplace." Now at the helm of Tether, his own design studio and retail space in Seattle, Hainsworth keeps looking for new challenges. "When I left Starbucks, people thought I'd want to work someplace really hip, like Diesel or Apple. I told them I wanted to work with Microsof

The Smoking Gun of Alignment » Crandell’s Corner Boards and CEO, regardless of their domain expertise, are puzzled as to how to measure marketing. When asked what metrics they use the most frequent response is leads. Yet when probed, it’s not really leads, it’s inquiries. Both groups then lament on how marketing cannot produce quality “leads” and when asked how they fix the situation, the most frequent response is to replace the CMO. The response was the same for those CEOs that rose through sales as well as marketing ranks. ... a great post by @ ChrisCrandell

Executive Summary Brands are jumping on the Facebook bandwagon to reach customers. The Society of Digital Agencies reports that more than 45% of senior marketers worldwide named social networks and applications their top priority for 2010. Yet despite the urgency, most brands lack a strategy. Altimeter Group conducted research, and gleaned input from 34 vendors, agencies, and experts, to determine success criteria and develop a roadmap for Facebook page best practices. We found Eight Success Criteria for Facebook page marketing, and then tested the maturity of 30 top brands across six industries. Our heuristic evaluation revealed that brands fell short half of the brands we reviewed (14 out of 30) did not fully leverage social features to activate word of mouth, the hallmark behavior of social networks. Within this immature landscape, a few brands were on the right track to successfully harnessing Facebook page marketing. Brands like Pampers, Macy's, Kohl's, and AXE increased e

The original author of this is Holger Schulze . I find his B2B marketing framework interesting as well.

Fire Your Marketing Manager and Hire A Community Manager - David Armano - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review A community manager actively monitors, participates in and engages others within online communities. These communities can be on Twitter, Facebook, message boards, intranets, wherever groups of people come together to converse and interact with each other. A traditional marketing manager is likely to have little experience with this function. Historically, community management developed outside marketing, in areas such as community organizing (politics) or in niche verticals such as the video game or software industry, which are no strangers to digital outposts such as message boards. Spending four semesters in b-school, makes one knowledgeable enough to sort out genuine marketing efforts from nonsense. The world has enough marketers who talk about social media and blogs without maintaining neither of their own, and throw around phrases like "unique proposition"

Twitter - Murder Bittorrent Deploy System from Larry Gadea on Vimeo . The Twitter Engineering Blog: Murder: Fast datacenter code deploys using BitTorrent It was time for something completely different, something decentralized, something more like.. BitTorrent .. running inside of our datacenter to quickly copy files around. Using the file-sharing protocol, we launched a side-project called Murder and after a few days (and especially nights) of nervous full-site tinkering, it turned a 40 minute deploy process into one that lasted just 12 seconds! Murder (which by the way is the name for a flock of crows) is a combination of scripts written in Python and Ruby to easily deploy large binaries throughout your company’s datacenter(s). It takes advantage of the fact that the environment in a datacenter is somewhat different from regular internet connections: low-latency access to servers, high bandwidth, no NAT/Firewall issues, no ISP traffic shaping, only trusted peers, etc. This let us co

You can listen to the recorded webinar and download these slides from the WSO2 Oxygen Tank as well. Confessions of-a-gadget-holic View more presentations from tyrell .

A Great Boss is Confident, But Not Really Sure - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review My favorite track on Tom Petty's 2006 album Highway Companion is a song called "Saving Grace." About halfway through, he closes off a verse by singing: "You're confident but not really sure." That's a state of mind that sounds paradoxical, but at times it really is true. In fact, it's the essence of what developmental psychologist John Meacham called the "attitude of wisdom." And it's a good description of some bosses I know, who strike a healthy balance between knowing and doubting. A good companion read for this is " Confident But Not Really Sure: A JetBlue Boss and Other Examples of Wisdom ". It's a follow up post with examples.

An interesting presentation. Nice flow and some good data in there. Apple Study: 8 easy steps to beat Microsoft (and Google) View more presentations from Ouriel Ohayon .

On Wednsday, 14th July 2010 I will be conducting a one hour webinar explaining Enterprise App Stores as described in a previous post here . We will run this during two time slots. 9 AM - 10 AM (GMT) and 10 AM - 11 AM (PDT). Here's a sneak peak at the topics I plan to cover; App stores - Components of an App Store echo system and how they interact together App Stores in the Enterprise - Self Service IT Mashups - How they can provide APIs to App developers and facilitate code re-use Google gadgets - The Apps that will power your Enterprise App Store The Enterprise Gadget Repository - The App Directory that powers your Enterprise App Store Tips and tricks that may come in handy .... So if you haven't already, register and drop in at a convenient time slot depending on your time zone :) UPDATE: The recorded webinar and slides are here .

China's Exchange Rate Policy: What's Really Going On - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review "You don't need complex models to predict that the renminbi will remain undervalued for a long time. Whereas an equilibrium exchange rate must eventually lead to a balance in international payments, the data show that between 2000 and 2007, China's share of global manufacturing output soared from 5.7% to 11.4%, and it accumulated foreign exchange reserve of nearly 2.4 trillion dollars. Those are the world's largest reserves in absolute terms; in relative terms, they're astonishing. They account for 50% of China's GDP, 12% of US GDP, and 30% of the world's reserves today. China knows it must do something radical to rectify the imbalance and a tightly managed float against a basket of foreign currencies isn't the solution."

In my previous post, Portals and Mashups in the Cloud , I described an ecosystem that can be deployed either in your data centre or in the cloud. An ecosystem such as above will allow enterprises to do two important things; Expose APIs for third party mashup/gadget developers to utilise in their apps Maintain a repository where business users can visit, browse and select apps from. These apps run in their personal portal pages. Within that post lies the fundamentals of an Enterprise App Store . What is an enterprise app store? Well, in the mobile device world of iPhones, Androids and Symbians, we all use an app store at one point or the other. Whether it's iTunes, The Android Market Place or Nokia's OVI Store, we all visit them and they provide one significant benefit in general. We get to personalise our device with the applications we need. We get to build, at a software level, a phone that is optimised for our day-to-day use, without being programmers. We also get to influen

A few days ago Azeez, the senior architect behind WSO2 Stratos wrote a detailed post about its deployment architecture. He tells the story of how we migrated our carbon product stack to the cloud-native platform that we named WSO2 Stratos. So what does the future hold for portal and mashup developers? How will Stratos change our lives? As you can see the WSO2 Mashup Server and WSO2 Gadget Server are also deployed in Stratos as cloud-native services. This means that organisations will be able to deploy highly scalable, highly available, distributed applications with ease. And they will be far less expensive than today with a granular, pay-as-you-go model. This is good news for mashup developers because now we can re-use code and services in a massive scale without an exponential increase in infrastructure costs as our mashups become popular. For instance, imagine that you have a mashup and plan to sell it as a service. The old model would demand that you invest heavily on servers an

What's Stratos ? It's the cloud-native version of WSO2's award winning Carbon Platform. I emphasised cloud-native because there's a difference between that and just deploying a web application to a service like Amazon EC2. Cloud-native implies five things ... Elasticity : Stratos manages your underlying cloud infrastructure to seamlessly handle the scalability demands of your application. Multi-tenancy : Departments, developer groups, or projects run fully independently, but share the same middleware platform for maximum resource utilization. Billing and Metering : Each tenant can meter their actual resource use for internal billing purposes. Self Provisioning : Authorized users can provision new tenants from a web portal in moments. Dynamic Discovery : Linking up services that reside in a dynamic and elastic environment can be tricky but Stratos simplifies and automates this process with standards-based service discovery and automatic configuration capabilities. I

LOST aired its final episode a few days ago after six seasons of great, intellectually stimulating story telling by its writers. As is the case with great works of fiction, the internet is filled with debates among fans trying to explain everything that happened in summary. The most satisfying explanation I came across so far was from a Digg user . Although he doesn't link to the source, he claims it's from one of the producers. Following is his explanation verbatim (images and emphasis mine). First ... The Island: It was real. Everything that happened on the island that we saw throughout the 6 seasons was real. Forget the final image of the plane crash, it was put in purposely to f*&k with people's heads and show how far the show had come. They really crashed. They really survived. They really discovered Dharma and the Others. The Island keeps the balance of good and evil in the world. It always has and always will perform that role. And the Island will always need a &

The India Way of Leading Business - Imagining the Future of Leadership - Harvard Business Review "When Indian companies, for instance, take over publicly traded American firms — such as Tata Motors' acquisition of Ford's Jaguar and Land Rover divisions in 2008 — research confirms that the acquired firms increased both their efficiency and their profitability. Rather than appreciating the value of the India Way only upon acquisition, Western firms might be well advised to have a careful look in advance. Understanding the India Way and its drivers has become important for business managers everywhere."

"WALLDORF, Germany and Dublin, California, USA - May 12, 2010 - SAP (NYSE: SAP) and Sybase, Inc., Dublin, California (USA) (NYSE: SY) today announced that SAP’s subsidiary, SAP America, Inc., has signed a definitive merger agreement to acquire Sybase, Inc., in a transaction that will bring the two information technology (IT) leaders together to enable companies to become better-run “unwired enterprises.” As a result of this transaction, customers will be able to better harness today’s explosion of data and deliver information and insight in real time to business consumers wherever they work so they can make faster, more informed decisions. Companies will benefit from greater productivity, speed and agility to help their businesses grow. Under the terms and conditions of the merger agreement, SAP America, Inc., will make an all cash tender offer for all of the outstanding shares of Sybase common stock at $65.00 per share, representing an enterprise value of approximately $5.8 billi

HTML5 defines a standard way to embed video in a web page, using a "<video>" element. What does this mean for us? A few things. Soon all major browsers will support HTML5 (including firefox from version 4). This means that with HTML5 and an h.264 video codec in your system, you no longer have to install a Flash plugin to view video on the web. YouTube is already in beta with their HTML5 player . Which brings up my other find... Open Standard Media (OSM) Player is an all-in-one media player for the web. It is an industry changing, open source (GPLv3) media player that is written in jQuery to dynamically deliver any type of web media. Don't just take my word for it, just browse to http://www.mediafront.org/ with your HTML5 supported browser. Flash! Looks like your days are numbered. Once HTML5 is in all major browsers and toolkits such as JQuery and GWT add API components for the new HTML5 media tags and WebSockets , there won't be a need for 3rd party plugins.

Leading from Behind - Imagining the Future of Leadership - Harvard Business Review For now and into coming decade or so, the most effective leaders will lead from behind, not from the front — a phrase I've borrowed from none other than Nelson Mandela. In his autobiography, Mandela equated a great leader with a shepherd: "He stays behind the flock, letting the most nimble go out ahead, whereupon the others follow, not realizing that all along they are being directed from behind." Hasn't this been the ideal for some for at least 2010 years? I always interpreted leadership this way, maybe because as a Christian the ultimate leader was considered the Good Shepherd. Leading the flock, keeping the sheep together and even times abandoning the rest, just to find and bring in that one member of the flock who has gone astray.

Google Analytics Applications are third party applications that uses APIs provided by Google to extend existing functionality of Analytics and Adwords. For instance if you are a marketer looking for better segmentation of your sites users, you can use an app from the gallery or build one of your own. If you are a developer, read this tutorial for sample code and a demo app.

The Open Social Development Environment is a nice, Apache 2.0 licensed Eclipse plugin that helps developers to ... Create an Open Social (gadget) project via a wizard Generate a foundation gadget by configuring its properties through a wizard and Preview the gadget using its embedded Shindig/Jetty runtime

Strategy's Golden Rule - Umair Haque - Harvard Business Review In difference lie the seeds of disruption. In similarity, only obsolescence, and decay . As Michael Porter and Gary Hamel have both so eloquently discussed, the essence of strategy is discovering meaningful differences that make a firm inimitable, singular, and unique. Strategy's cornerstone, that is how to build a disruptively different business.

IT is industrializing: What does that mean to me? | The View from Forrester Research | ZDNet.com Manufacturing process improvements like the assembly line and just-in-time manufacturing combined with automation and statistical quality control to ensure that we can make products faster and more consistently, at a lower cost. Most of the products we use could not exist without an industrialized model. Wal-Mart has industrialized retail, by perfecting industrialized supply chain management. Supply chain management at Wal-Mart (and many other game-changing companies) is incredible. Products are always moving and the supply-demand cycles ebb and flow almost instantaneously to market demand, with inventories kept at a bare minimum everywhere and always. Service companies like FedEx, Amazon, and Apple’s iTunes also demonstrate the power to destroy the old models of business because their business models are based on the same principles of industrialization. A good, thought provoking article.

"A buyer persona is a detailed profile of an example buyer that represents the real audience – an archetype of the target buyer. Marketers can use buyer personas to clarify the goals, concerns, preferences and decision process that are most relevant to their customers. Imagine how effective marketers could be if we would all stop making stuff up and start aligning our messages and programs with the way real people think." I just came across a nice blog dedicated to the study of "Buyer Personas". The above explanation is from there. The author also posts some practical examples ... "Design engineers frequently build user personas as a part of their product development process. The application of personas for marketing is less common, but hardly without precedent. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush successfully campaigned to the soccer mom persona during the 1992, 1996 and 2000 elections. By 2004, the soccer mom had morphed into a security mom persona as

Confused? Some of the engineers at Google have used their 20% time to port Jake2, a Java port of the Qake 2 engine to Javascript. "We started with the existing Jake2 Java port of the Quake II engine, then used the Google Web Toolkit " (along with WebGL, WebSockets, and a lot of refactoring) to cross-compile it into Javascript. You can see the results in the video above -- we were honestly a bit surprised when we saw it pushing over 30 frames per second on our laptops (your mileage may vary)!" Here's a demo. I, for one, can't wait to try it out (and have a look at the GWT code of course).

Google Code Blog: OAuth access to IMAP/SMTP in Gmail Google has long believed that users should be able to export their data and use it with whichever service they choose. For years, the Gmail service has supported standard API protocols like POP and IMAP at no extra cost to our users. These efforts are consistent with our broader data liberation efforts. In addition to making it easier for users to export their data, we also enable them to authorize third party (non-Google developed) applications and websites to access their data at Google. One of the more common examples is allowing a social network to access your address book in order to send invitations to your friends. This is great news for Gadget and Mashup developers. We will definetely have some sample Gadgets and Mashups in a near future release using the newly 'liberated' GMail :)

Enterprise OSGi spec rolls out at EclipseCon At EclipseCon in Santa Clara, Calif., the OSGi Alliance announced approval of its long-brewing OSGi Enterprise Specification (Release 4, Version 4.2). This release of the OSGi bundled component standard is targeted at a broad group of Java application server developers. Greater modularity and increased component re-use are main OSGi goals.

The WSO2 Mashup Server, still the only true Free and Open Source Mashup platform in the industry will see its 2.1.0 release alongside Carbon 3.0.0 - Irridium. Highlights for this release include ... Carbon 3.0.0 - Irridium as base platform Hierarchical mashup deployment (mashups deployed under user work spaces) New HTTP client Host Object to retrieve any resource over the internet, supplementing the Screen Scraper and WSRequest Host Objects and numerous fixes and improvements as suggested by users in our forums  We are almost there with version 1.1.0 release of the WSO2 Gadget Server and Nuwan, a key member of my team has done a nice round up of the latest features and improvements we've done for this release. To highlight ... We are powered by Carbon 3.0.0 - Irridium Latest stable revision of Apache Shindig Pub/Sub and i18n for Gadgets and HTTP mode portal (in case you haven't noticed we ran the portal on HTTPS in previous releases, which was not a must, since Gadgets themsel

Conversational Marketing View more presentations from Arto Joensuu . This came via Annie Infinite . One of the marketers in my social network.

Step 1: Go to layout settings in your blogger.com blog and click "Add a Gadget". Step 2: Click "Add your own" and type the gadget URL as http://gsdemo.wso2.org/registry/resource/system/gadgets/soa.xml (This gadget is hosted in the WSO2 Gadget Server demo instance at http://gsdemo.wso2.org) Step 3: Change gadget settings if required and click "Save". Step 4: Save your layout. Now the latest posts from the SOA Platform Blog will be visible in your blog. And the beauty of this particular gadget is that your viewers can read the SOA Platform Blog's posts without leaving your blog :)

Read the original article here. Forrester analyst Nigel Fenwick makes a nice connection between Abraham Maslow's classical theory on the Human Hierarchy of Needs and the needs and aspirations of those who participate in today's on-line communities. At a glance the mapping looks like .... The author recommends that those who develop/host such communities keep these motivational factors in mind and facilitate achieving them via; Offering a mechanism for easy communication (e.g. micro-blogging). Helping members to connect through rich profiles and profile search with friending. Encouraging support by providing not only Q&A but also the ability to vote and reward contributions Providing the ability to share ideas and to comment and add insight such as through virtual whiteboards, photos, video or a wiki-type content platform. Good read!

India, China make mark on Forbes rich list / The Christian Science Monitor - CSMonitor.com Eight Indians made Forbes magazine’s latest list of the top 100 billionaires, and two – energy tycoon Mukesh Ambani and steel mogul Lakshmi Mittal – sit in the top 5. Mr. Ambani is now the fourth richest person in the world, and the richest person in the Asia-Pacific region.

Nice lyrics!!

HBRs Umair Haque takes an in depth look at Google Buzz. Quite frankly, after a few days as a user and the amount of privacy issues encountered with the lack of anything breathtakingly new, I have to agree. Google Buzz and the Five Principles of Designing For Meaning - Umair Haque - Harvard Business Review Tomorrow's products and services have to be designed not just for mere consumption, but "designed for meaning": they must yield lasting, shared, meaningful economic gains — or else. Or else we continue our voyage into a no-future future. That's the big picture that tomorrow's radical innovators must redraw. I think Google Buzz is actually really, really cool — it's just not yet a meaningful service. It lives in the shadow of yesterday's big picture, instead of redrawing it. Redrawing the big picture of prosperity, by going from Great to Good: that's today's fundamental challenge.

Haiti Is a Marketing Lesson - Dan Pallotta - Harvard Business Review "The reason people are giving so much money to Haiti is simple: They are hearing about it. They are seeing and reading about the catastrophe over and over again on the front page, in prime time, and in viral web appeals 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This is not a singular occurrence: Every so often, for brief moments, disasters trigger the deluge of media for humanity as is enjoyed every day by the likes of Budweiser, BMW, and the iPod. If it had to be paid for, the media that is currently publicizing Haiti would cost many tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars. But alas, we would never let humanitarian organizations spend that kind of money on advertising, despite the fact that it might bring in many times more dollars than it costs." Interesting read, considering the fact that even for-profit marketers seem to ignore these fundamentals sometimes.

We announced the releases of WSO2 Mashup Server version 2.0.2 and WSO2 Gadget Server version 1.0.1 yesterday. These releases as usual include improvements and fixes and in case of the Mashup Server, a new Host Object in addition to the collection already available. So make sure you have a look at the brand new HttpClient Host Object once you download 2.0.2 . I'm really happy about the traction WSO2 Gadget Server is gaining since its initial release in December 2009. It not only fulfils the last mile of our SOA platform story by providing a presentation layer, but also uses the Google Gadgets Specification to make this presentation layer SOA centric and interoperable with other portals such as iGoogle. And the most encouraging part? The users get it. That is a great feeling. Our next major set of releases will come in March 2010, code named Iridium and will have some major enhancements and features. We are also doing a great amount of work targeting the Cloud. The WSO2 Gadget S

Webinar: New Decade, New Portal In this webinar, Paul Fremantle, CTO of WSO2, will be explaining the benefits of the Gadget approach to portals, and also showing how you can get started with building effective portals fast. Tune in to find out about the best portal for the next decade. Starts: Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 09:00 AM; Ends: 10:00 AM (PST) Presenter: Paul Fremantle Register Now it's free!

Don't Make Conan's Mistake - The Conversation - Harvard Business Review So what's in your best interest? How can you avoid making Conan's mistake? Stay in your role because you are gaining experiences that will help you achieve your long-term career objectives, or because you think it is the job you can get at the moment, or because it's fun — but you don't stay in your job because of some potential future rewards that may or may not materialize. No organization can make reasonable promises of future placement — you're setting yourself up for disappointment trusting an organization to honor that agreement. In fact, that's essentially today's career deal. I've had a similar discussion recently during a gathering of friends and those who were there might remember my stance being exactly this. If I have anything more to add to this great post in HBR , it would be that ; every time you think about someone else's dream, you take time away from thi

Highlights from the report are; By 2012, 20% percent of businesses will have no ownership of IT assets . Fueled by technological developments in 2009, such as virtualization and cloud computing, there’s a movement toward decreased IT hardware assets and more ownership of hardware by third parties. By 2012, India-based IT companies will represent 20% of cloud service providers in the market. Gartner attributes this to companies leveraging their market positions and R&D efforts in cloud computing, resulting in cloud-enabled outsourcing options. By 2012, Facebook will lead the pack in developing the distributed, interoperable social Web through Facebook Connect and similar mechanisms. The interoperability will be critical to survival of other social networks. Other social networks (including Twitter) will continue to develop with focus on greater adoption and specialization. However, they will all revolve around Facebook. By 2014, building on server vitalization and desktop power m

Is 2010 Another Great Year for Cloud Stocks? | AMR Research - Supply Chain Management Experts Today, cloud applications represent a small percent of software spend. In the Piper Jaffray study, it’s 5.7%. This is expected to grow to 13.5% of total spend over the next five years. Personally, I think that figure is too conservative. For now, 72% of respondents are leaning toward best-of-breed vendors for cloud applications. That said, though, when asked to select the tech vendor that would be a “material part of your organization’s cloud-computing plans,” Microsoft earned top billing with 65% of the vote, followed by Oracle (61%), VMware (55%), Google (53%), and salesforce.com (52%). If you’re curious about SAP’s ranking, only 11% see the ERP leader as a key cloud vendor. The relatively low response placed the company 16th on the list, trailing RIM, Dell, Red Hat, Amazon.com, IBM, Sun, EMC, Apple, Concur, and Yahoo.

WSO2 Gadget Server v1.0 Technical Briefing View more documents from WSO2 .

Gartner Acquires Burton Group STAMFORD, Conn., January 5, 2010 —    Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT), the leading provider of research and analysis on the global information technology industry, today announced that, on December 30, 2009, it acquired Burton Group, Inc. for approximately $56 million in cash. Burton Group is a leading research and advisory services firm that focuses on providing practical, technically in-depth advice to front-line IT professionals. The firm has approximately 41 research analysts, 40 sales and client service associates, and projected 2009 revenue of $30 million.