Time Warner dumped the misbegotten team of AOL CEO and chairman Randy Falco and COO Ron Grant late Thursday and wheeled in Tim Armstrong, until that minute Google’s Americas sales chief, as CEO and chairman. Google, remember, owns 5% of AOL bought at the cost of a billion dollars to keep Microsoft out. The companies also have a search ad deal. According to the formal announcement, Armstrong’s supposed to help Time Warner “determine the optimal structure for AOL.” Given his heritage it probably won’t have anything to do with Microsoft. One wonders if Google is keeping Armstrong’s chair warm since Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes is thought to favor a spin-off. ... (more)

AJAX Applications From JPA Entities

OpenXava 3.1.2, released recently, is a model-driven framework to develop Java Enterprise applications in an agile way: With OpenXava you provide only your POJOs annotated with JPA and you obtain an AJAX application ready for production. The main new feature of this 3.1.2 release is the support for view inheritance. Although OpenXava generates a workable user interface from your naked JPA entities, you have the option to refine the produced user interface using the @View annotation. Just in this way: @Entity @View(name="WithSections", members = "name, sex;" + "mainLanguage;" + "experiences { experiences }" ) public class Programmer { Since version 3.1.2 you can defined a view extending an existing one. For example, you can reuse the WithSections view in a child class of Programmer: @Entity @View(name="WithSections", extendsView="super.WithSections", members = "favouriteFr... (more)

The Perfect "Innovation" Storm

Innovation Journal on Ulitzer Another storm?  Didn’t we just have one in the financial and credit markets you say? Well, yes, and no.  Yes, we did have a storm, though it wasn’t one of innovation, unless we count the complex and innovative derivative instruments created by Wall St. in which banks, investment firms, and insurance companies participated, creating global instability, and resulting in the largest economic crisis since WWII. One can clearly see the power of innovation, whether positive or negative, the lever of innovation at work has tremendous potential for global impact.  As we enter an ever accelerating period of innovation in science and technology, we are beginning to see its impact. In recent news we note the government jumping into the cloud computing pool GSA Outlines U.S. Government’s Cloud Computing Requirements and today, another telling art... (more)

Twitter Is Worth a Billion – An Analyst's View of Why

Twitter’s $1 Billion valuation has definitely stolen the spotlight over the past few weeks. According to a recently released Twitter users study by Crowd Science among other findings: 11% of Twitter users admitted to accessing social media while driving during the preceding 30 days, compared with just 5% of other social media users 29% of Twitter users said they had accessed social media from cars at some point in the past, compared with 13% of non-users Twice as many Twitter users as non-Twitter social media users (8% to 4%) had accessed any social media from a theater during a movie or live performance 17% of Twitter users vs. 12% of non-Twitter social media users had accessed social media from a washroom or toilet And, according to the Houston Chronicle, there are those that have profited.  They reported The University of Texas Investment Management Company (UT... (more)

Stanford’s eCorner: Leveling the Intellectual Playing Field

What? Leveling the intellectual playing field with Stanford? The home of elite, wealthy and over-privileged? While eLearning is nothing new to the Internet generation, traditionally eLearning content was dull, "uninspirational," and in many cases an ineffective alternative to residence or classroom learning. Commercialized or neutralized to make lessons suitable for the masses, or in a worst case part of an uninspired project by religious or international organizations with motives more focused internally than for the benefit of their own organization – rather than the ultimate users of their product. So we compare access to intellectual stimulation and development a student may have in residence at Stanford, UC Berkeley, or MIT to a kid growing up in Ramallah (Palestine), and the playing field appears far from level. Stanford will continue to pump out global busine... (more)

links for 2010-02-04

The War For the Web – O'Reilly Radar The next few years are going to be pretty interesting. It seems to be heading for another war like the one on the PC platform. Given Apple's closed strategy, it would be good for them to open up or perish like they did last time. Things will get really hot once Google's bets pay off & mature & the pieces start falling in place. (tags: internet web2.0 google facebook web apple future trends oreilly) Open Access to Content and Applications (Adobe Featured Blogs) Why flash is important for the web and how Apple's stand is hurting its customers (tags: flash adobe apple html5 mobile ipad iphone google) Winmail.dat attachments – MozillaZine Knowledge Base A handy guide on how to open those winmail.dat files received by mails sent in Outlook. It apparently happens due to the rich text format being used in Outlook. (tags: thunderbird ema... (more)

Tim Bray Now Works for Google

Google News, Views and Updates on Ulitzer Tim Bray declined Oracle's offer, in the wake of the Oracle-Sun acquisition, to remain an employee in the newly merged Sunacle/Orasun. And has joined instead what he calls the "No-Evil Zone," a.k.a. Google. As he succinctly expresses it, on his blog dated Monday March 15, his first day at work for Google: "The title is 'Developer Advocate'. The focus is Android. Fun is expected." But there's also a quite detailed account of the background to this move... The showstopper to Bray's having moved to Google any sooner, apparently, was his reluctance to leave his native Canada for the Bay Area. Once it emerged that remaining in Vancouver was an option, that was the tipping point. Another tipping-point was apparently the nature of his interaction with his new masters, once Oracle had officially become the owners and operatorrs of Sun: ... (more)

Citizen Journalists Are Back!

New Media on Ulitzer Newspapers were published from the 1500s to the 1900s, not by professional journalists but by citizen journalists. Now, with the worldwide movement of citizen journalism, THE CITIZENS ARE BACK! The idea of citizens writing the news is not a new one. In fact, it is an idea that is as old as the newspaper itself. There were no professional journalists around 50 BC when Julius Caesar, serving as the First Counsel of Rome, ordered scribes to publish the Acta Diurna, a daily report of governmental activities. There were no professional journalists in the early 1400s to take advantage of Johann Gutenberg’s new and exciting moveable type press. In fact, it wasn’t until 1505 that a German printer in Augsburg named Erhard Oeglin put out a broadside that announced the discovery of Brazil. There were no professional journalists to chronicle the travels of Mar... (more)

Google Trashes Gears

Google is dumping Gears, the widgetry used to let Google Apps work offline. The functionality has been moved to HTML 5. The company said in a blog that there will be no new Gears releases, newer browsers such as Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9 won't be supported with plug-ins, and Gears will be removed from Chrome in Chrome 12. In its place it's implemented support for application caches to replace Gears' offline features, replaced Gears Database API with an IndexedDB API that its "friends at Mozilla and Microsoft" - yeah, it really said that - collaborated on, substituted a File API for Gears' Blob functionality and implemented the geolocation, notifications and web worker APIs in Gears natively in Chrome. "Our mission with Gears," the post says, "was to enable more powerful web applications. Over 5 releases, we added tons of APIs, enabling everything from offli... (more)

Google Enterprise Shows Us SMAC in the Real World

For readers not yet familiar with the acronym SMAC, it represents social, mobile, analytics and cloud.  In this short video, Google demonstrates, through Google Enterprise, how companies can implement a SMAC strategy to improve the following: Improve meetings and collaboration Work better with mobile and remote team members Speed up decision making Improve company meetings Better manage projects and share documents, presentations and spreadsheets Secure data Easily train new employees Rapidly create new collaboration sites for new projects and initiatives Reduce IT costs Stay focused on your core business Better support for mobile workers Access data and content on any internet connected mobile device More... Video Link: http://youtu.be/vNJUL92y9wo ************************************************************* Kevin Benedict, Head Analyst for Social, Mobile, Analytics... (more)

APIs are the big winner in this year's America's Cup

There is a great piece over on ProgrammableWeb this week about APIs and the America's Cup, written by my colleagues Hugh Carroll and Dave Murphy. They note that: At one point in time, the America’s Cup was a byword for secrecy, with each team zealously guarding every change it made to the design of a hull or keel as each team sought to gain an advantage over its rivals using the latest in materials and computer-aided design.  Times have changed, however, with the advances of open API technology and pressure from sponsors and promoters encouraging race teams to adopt a more transparent approach. For the first time ever, all the data collected from the racing yachts is publicly available via Open APIs. This means the real-time position of the boats and race management data such as boundaries and penalties, will be streamed free of charge. Developers can now build Androi... (more)