We’ll be at the WordCamp Israel 2008 convention tomorrow showing off some of the latest Nuconomy developments (and of course, our WordPress plugin).
Here’s Niv surveying last year’s visitors:
See you there!
Tags: Israel, WordCamp, Wordcamp 2008, WordPress
If you like the scrolling functionality as implemented in the iPhone (and Zune etc.) you’ll be happy to know its part of the Windows 7 operating system and implemented for anything with a scrollbar.
More Windows 7 goodies on Rafael Rivera’s blog…
Tags: Kinetic Scrolling, Microsoft, Multi-Touch, Panning, Windows 7
(Cross posted from CloudAve)
Microsoft announced today its rollout plans for the 3rd wave of Windows Live services.
The goal of this latest release wave, according to company officials, is to simplify the use of the offered services and unify the user’s entire online experience into the Windows Live interface.
Microsoft is planning to rollout the new services, currently in beta, to the public within the 1-2 months timeframe.
One of Microsoft’s main emphasis with the current wave of services is on social networking between users using its services.
Microsoft finally figured out that its Live Messenger with about 268 million users worldwide, is by far the most popular instant messaging software in the world, is actually a social networks. With the new release, your Live Messenger contacts are now your Friends and you can see aggregated information about their activities on the net.
Very much like Plaxo, FriendFeed etc. Microsoft allows users to bring into their profile content they create in all sorts of services on the web (Live Services, Flickr, LinkedIn, blogs and RSS feeds, …) and share it with their friends and colleagues.
When users add photos, write reviews, and update their profiles directly on Live.com, that content will be put into their activity stream as well.
This activity stream is exposed in all sort of ways throughout Microsoft’s services interface.
For example, Microsoft’s new Live Home portal shows the latest events in your social network. When emailing a friend or chatting on Messenger you’re also able to interact with that friend’s activity stream and more…
I’ve been told that all these new service updates will not skip Windows Live Domains used by universities and organizations to create a personalized version of Microsoft’s services.
If that really the case, having all these new social capabilities as part of its domain offering can be amazing for collaboration and communication inside the organization.
While Google doesn’t seem to care about its Google Applications for Your Domains customers its good to see that Microsoft is going forward with Live Domains.
This latest update may just be the final straw I need to make the switch to Live Domains…
It will be really interested to see where Live Mesh comes into the picture in regards to all of these Live services.
Live Mesh should be the glue bridging between Microsoft’s online services and its offline applications and devices (S+S) allowing users to sync all their content- contacts, photos, events, favorites, etc. - across devices and services.
Unfortunately, there’s no clear answer for that…
During the launch we’ve only heard about Live Sync allowing users to sync photos across computers. Some sources say its an incarnation of FolderShare and in any case it doesn’t seem to be based on Live Mesh technology.
With Live Mesh being one of Microsoft’s core platform offering its really hard to understand why we need to have Live Sync too…
Tags: Google, Live Mesh, Microsoft, SkyDrive, social networks, Windows Live
(Originally posted at Cloud Avenue)
This year’s Microsoft Profesional Developers Conference is full of announcements and surprises. The next big announcement besides Windows Azure (and Windows 7?) is the new “Office Web Applications” live service. The Office team will be delivering the five most popular Office applications as light weight browser based versions that include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.
Here are some of the demo screenshots available:
The applications will be offered in both a simple HTML/AJAX version and a rich-client Silverlight version.
Office Web Applications are not planned to replace Microsoft’s traditional desktop offering but rather complete it, together with Mobile Office for mobile devices, allowing users to seamlessly work on their documents across all environments.
Providing such a reach collaboration environment isn’t a simple task as you can see in the following interview of Antoine Leblond, Senior VP of Office Productivity Apps and Chris Bryant, General Program Manager:
Although its not meant to replace its Desktop Office offering, one of Microsoft’s biggest cash cows, one has got to wonder about the risk these new services to cannibalize their big desktop brother’s profits. Windows and Office, which are Microsoft’s core business, are likely to stay its core moneymakers for at least the next 2-3 years, maybe even longer.
This move clearly shows that Microsoft is starting to think beyond that and along with its other platform announcements (Azure, Live Mesh…) we can clearly see a trend away from desktop software to rich clients installed from the web….
Office Web Applications will be released to a limited set of partners and customers at the end of this year. The release date will closely align with Office 14 and Windows 7 which will be sometime in late 2009 or early 2010.
Microsoft plans to make Office Web Applications available as a service through its Live platform supporting both an ad-funded and a paid-subscription models.
Business users that require an on-premise will be able to do so through Sharepoint via its traditional volume licensing program.
Tags: Cloud Avenue, Desktop Office, Microsoft, Microsoft Office, Mobile Office, Office, Office 14, Office Live, Office Productivity Apps, Office Suites, Office Web Applications, PDC 2008, Web Applications, Windows, Windows 7
(Originally posted at Cloud Avenue)
Windows Live™Microsoft’s Windows Live ID team just announced their support for OpenID calling it a “de facto standard Web protocol for user authentication.”
Beginning today, Windows Live™ ID is publicly committing to support the OpenID digital identity framework with the announcement of the public availability of a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the Windows Live ID OpenID Provider.
You will soon be able to use your Windows Live ID account to sign in to any OpenID Web site!
OpenID allows users to maintain their identity information (Name, E-Mail, address, etc.) on a single provider and use that information to register and login to any website that supports OpenID. This relieves the user from having to fill out registration form and maintaining multiple different user names and passwords and profiles on different sites add provides a simplified online experience while increasing security.
Over 400 million LiveID users will soon be able to use their LiveID to do just that – login and provide identity information to any site supporting OpenID without the hassles of filling out registration forms and saving user\password information and with the user experience common to all OpenId sites (or, maybe even common to their familiar LiveID user interface?)
The wide adoption of OpenID led by Yahoo and Microsoft provides the required push for site owners to support OpenID providing the same simple and familiar login interface everywhere…
With a simple integration effort that shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes, site owners can relieve themselves from taking care of authentication and registration process while providing their users with a simple familiar interface for signing up and using their services.
OpenID provides an easy and secure mechanism for authenticating and registering users, and with additional online services (like JanRain’s RPX) site owners can handover the entire care of handling their user information to the cloud – cheaper, faster, more secure.
For now, the LiveID team is testing their system’s OpenID Provider which is at a CTP (Community Technology Preview) stage. Widespread support is planned for “sometime in 2009″.
[Update: Screencast Overview]
Tags: Cloud Avenue, Federated Identity, LiveID, Microsoft, OpenID, Security, Windows Live, Yahoo
Last month Google released its Chrome browser to the public and as usual it made a lot of PR noise (and a comic book) and got lots of favorable reviews
Google released its Chrome browser to the world about a month ago. It made a lot of PR noise, a comic book, and squeezed some outrageously favorable remarks from critics.
“When combined with Gears, which allows for offline access, Chrome is nothing less than a full on desktop operating system that will compete head on with Windows. “
Michael Arrington in “Meet Chrome, Google’s Windows Killer” (TechCrunch)
A month later, is Google Chrome even close to the the expectations set on its launch?
Read about it Cloud Avenue…
Update October 21th, 2008:
Be sure to read the discussion on the comments section at CloudAve and Krishnan’s response post…
Related stories:
Tags: Chrome, GOOG, Google, operating system
The hero of our story is Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.
The background for the following discussion is a post made by Dare Obasanjo referring to TechCrunch as FuckedCompany 2.0. A response on TechCrunch was soon to follow, blaming Microsoft as a company for the things said.
(You can read the full details here and here)
The discussion then moved to Twitter where it deteriorated pretty fast:
Regardless of the topic and which side is wrong or right, discussion should reach this kind of level…
While Dare’s blog may have an impact on Microsoft’s brand, its no question that whatever Michael does impacts the TechCrunch brand. The above discussion doesn’t do well to TechCrunch…
The of the story? Never (ever!) write when you’re upset.
Or to be more exact, take the night to sleep it off before you publish it. If you still think your text is ok on the next morning, then by all means publish it.
Remember that text (e-mail, blog post, twit, etc.) is a terrible medium for communicating emotion. The reader can’t see your facial expression or hear your vocal intonation. Therefore, any negative emotion that is expressed in the text is probably going to be perceived several times stronger – much more than intended – probably just causing damage instead of getting your point across.
When I was at SAP it wasn’t uncommon for me to get really upset and write long, angry emails through the night. Most of these never saw their way outside of my drafts folder. I would wake up the day after and figure out that things aren’t that bad, that there’s a better way of handling it, or simply that I have to pick my battles and that there’s more important stuff to spend my time on…
I’m sure Michael’s reactions are just a result of frustration and the heat of the moment. In fact, Michael edited the post and removed the controversial paragraph the day after.
Everything’s brighter on the morning after…
(P.S., if you just can’t hold it until the next morning, at least take a moment and listen to yourself. You’ll get a different perspective doing a second reading. I used to have a rule in my Outlook to elay delivery on any email I send by 2 minutes. It helps….)
Omer (our gracious host) just announced it on his blog.
I’ve never actually attended one of these before (I just happened to be abroad on the last dinners) so I’m expecting to meet everyone there…
The location is yet undecided (depends on you people) and you can RSVP at the event’s Facebook page.
Go on and spread the word…
Here are a couple of links to help you remember:
See you there!
* Yes I stole the picture from Scott’s blog…
** http://events.live.com is actually useful! Kudos to Microsoft….
I don’t get it. A bunch of tech ‘elites’ partying out in Cyprus made a funny video and suddenly they’re turned scapegoats for the entire web industry?
I guess they’re to blame in the housing led recession and over leveraged financials led by bank managers…
Oh well…
Tags: Humor, Technology, Web 2.0
Reading Mary Jo Foley’s Microsoft 2.0
Instead of being quite so blatant, Microsoft has taken a quieter back route to achieving the same ends via two related technologies:
- Baking SharePoint reliance into more and more of its products
- Requiring users to buy pricey client-access licenses (CALs) in order to use Microsoft’s servers
Microsoft has been basing a growing number of its products on SharePoint technologies to provide basic common services like storage, pub/sub, identity/security infrastructure, communications and collaboration functionalities.
With SharePoint’s BDC catalog and search server it is apparent that Microsoft is targeting SharePoint to serve as an integration layer on top of services and LOB applications in the organization.
…
Read the complete post at Cloud Avenue.
(Oh, and while at it, you may want to grab the CloudAve feed. Thank you.)
Tags: Cloud Avenue, Microsoft, MOSS, SharePoint, SharePoint technologies, Windows Cloud OS
(Originally posted on Cloud Avenue)
Jeff Barr from Amazon Web Service reports that Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) is now storing more than 29 billion, an increase of 7 billion from the previous quarter:
As one of the S3 engineers told me last week, that’s over 4 objects for every person now on Earth!
Our customers are keeping S3 pretty busy too. To give you an example of what this means in practice, the peak S3 usage for October 1st was over 70,000 storage, retrieval, and deletion requests per second.
Amazon is also lowering the prices on S3 storage, with a new four-tier pricing plan that takes effect on Nov. 1st. Customers storing more than 500 terabytes will get a rate of 12 cents per gigabyte.
With such a huge amount of data, low prices, and abundance of success stories, it really seems like Amazon has got a revolutionary service on its hands…
Tags: Amazon, AWS, S3, Simple Storage Service
The season for Flues and Colds is here again and I just had to share this:
![2586687783_bc3cafd4db[1]](http://storage.developerzen.com//2008/10/2586687783-bc3cafd4db1.jpg "2586687783_bc3cafd4db[1]")
Nokia recently announced its new 5800 Xpress Music, or Tube, as an “iPhone Killer”. Reviewers, however, disagree, mainly on hardware spec grounds – no touchscreen, S60 software issues.
What most reviewers seem to ignore is that even if Nokia (or Google, Sony, LG etc.) do come up with a device that matches the iPhone’s technical abilities (and I’m sure they have the required resources to do so) they’re still going to have a tough time competing with it.
Why? They way they sell and support their devices is very different than Apple.
When you buy an iPhone you have one company that control’s your entire experience with the device. From purchasing to ongoing operations and services its all ran by Apple that controls the entire product experience etc.
Apple bundles its iPhone with a set of services (AppStore, iTunes, Music Store…) that are tightly integrated with the device allowing easy consumption by customers which eventually is what’s driving Apple’s business.
Nokia, Sony, LG etc., on the other hand, sell the device through partnerships with different communication companies such as Orange Partner, which in turn, works with local sub-diaries. They rely on these partners for supporting their device and providing services to customers which often results in poor (sometime broken) customer experience.
Speaking at an Israeli GarageGeeks meeting, Steve Glagow, VP of Marketing Operations at Orange Partner VP mentioned that due to the fact they have to work with many regional and local partners, it takes more than 3 clicks and several screens for a user to install an application. Although he said their application installation rate is high (percentage of users who reach the application marketplace and end up installing an application) its a misleading measurement as most users will give up and never even reach the marketplace – only users determined to install an application will go through that effort.
Bundling your device with services is a winning strategy, not just for cellphones. Microsoft’s Xbox Live! platform is another great example on how bundling a device with online services helps increasing its value and perception.
Killing the iPhone will require more than just cool new hardware…
Related readings:
Tags: 5800, Apple, Google, iPhone, Microsoft, Nokia, Sony, Steve Glagow, Xpress Music, XpressMusic
Cloud Computing is the latest, hottest new buzzword in today’s information technology world. However, and much like other buzzwords such as Web x.0, it seems to be losing whatever meaning it once had as an increasing number of companies, not wanting to miss out on the latest hype, are starting to use it for their product’s PR campaigns….
Read the complete post at Cloud Avenue.
Tags: Amazon, Cloud Avenue, Cloud Computing, Oracle
We’re living in an age of technological revolution in the computer and information industry – the age of utility computing. Connected to the internet’s global computing grid, massive information-processing plants are pumping software code and data to our homes and businesses.
Armed with new business models and technologies that take advantage of the internet cloud, new competitors like Google, SalesForce.com and Amazon are threatening traditional software giants like Microsoft, SAP and Dell by changing the way software is built, sold, delivered and maintained.
On the way to making computing an efficient, cheap global commodity we’re facing new difficult business and technological (and some might even add political) challenges. There’s a lot of exciting innovation ahead…
Certainly, such a technology tidal wave deserve its fair share of coverage, which now comes in the form of the recently launched Cloud Avenue – A new blog, edited by Zoli Erdos and Ben Kepes, that will focus on cloud computing topics.
Cloud Avenue where, working with a few like-minded bloggers we’ll focus on the intersection of Cloud Computing, especially SaaS and Business, ranging from small business to enterprise.
… We also have our CloudLab - for product / service reviews. Yes, we will report on products, but do not strive to be a mini-TechCrunch: we have no intention to report about everything new. We’re not a news-blog. We’d rather sit back, analyze a market, find key players, then produce a series of reviews / comparative analysis. Quality before quantity or urgency.
Launched a little over a week ago, it has been pretty active with over 20 posts already. Below are just some of my personal highlights from the first week:
So join me in welcoming Cloud Avenue to the blogsphere 
Oh, and one more thing…
I’ve been invited by Zoli to join the CloudAve writing team and I’m definitely going to make some writing effort there. Should be interesting…
Tags: Cloud Computing, SaaS, Technology, Utility Computing
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