December 21st, 2007

Demo: ClusterSeven's Enterprise Spreadsheet Manager tightly monitors spreadsheet integrity

Posted by David Berlind @ 6:49 am

Categories: General, Government, IT Management, Legal, Reviewcasts, Software Infrastructure, Video

Tags: Monitor, Spreadsheet, Cell, Productivity, David Berlind

How many times have you stared at the bottom line of a spreadsheet that’s full of formulas knowing exactly what figures should be there, only to find that there’s a different set of numbers staring back at you than the ones you expected. You know there’s an offending cell somewhere, but the spreadsheet is too complex to find it and, with some deadline looming, out of exasperation, you start replacing formulas with hard coded numbers just to get it fixed, at least until after the deadline when you’ll have more time to figure out what went wrong. What’s the harm? Right? After all, the people looking at the final product might only be looking at a printout or a PowerPoint slide.

Well, given today’s compliance laws, the harm could be huge because of how those numbers can easily bubble up into an quarterly or annual earnings report. If such over-ridden cells end up corrupting some bigger picture report, the results could be disastrous (literally and figuratively). To help organizations and auditors keep spreadsheets from inadvertently (or even purposely) running amok, ClusterSeven has come up with a solution called Enterprise Spreadsheet Manager (ESM). In the attached video, ClusterSeven’s vice president of product marketing Ralph Baxter demonstrates how ESM can be configured to keep a watchful eye over any cell or range of cells in any spreadsheet.

As the contents of those cells change, ESM keeps track of when the changes were made, what the new values are, and who made the changes. In other words the audit trail is extremely tight. As you can see in the demo, one of the cool things ESM does is it monitors if cells are switching from their original programming type to another: for example from a formula to a hard-coded number (a sure sign that a spreadsheet and anything that depends on it could end up in a state of corruption).

ESM also graphically presents trends in cell and spreadsheet integrity. The advantage, which Baxter shows at the end of the video, is that those charged with compliance or auditing can build a single graph that includes trend lines for dozens or even hundreds of spreadsheets. Where a cell exceeds company-set thresholds for integrity (eg: varies from some number by a certain percentage, or a formula is suddenly overridden with hard-coded numbers), the trend-line fluctuates from its steady state wildly (making it easy to spot). Why would this be helpful? Well, if your annual report doesn’t look right but it depends on data coming from 100 or 1000 spreadsheets scattered throughout the organization, a single graph that monitors the integrity of all the spreadsheets that feed into that annual report can help spot the needle in the haystack that’s causing the problem. Otherwise, auditors and financial analysts might have to manually sift through every spreadsheet — a process that could take days or weeks.

All this whizbang functionality would be of limited help if it couldn’t be attached to an alerting mechanism. According to Baxter, there are ways to connect it to e-mail, internal LAN-based alerts (like Netsend) and SMS. ESM supports other spreadsheets beyond Excel (Google Spreadsheets for example). It also doesn’t come cheap with the average starting price ranging between $50K-$100K. But for some large companies where compliance is king, that could be pocket change given the sort of risk it mitigates. Finally, it requires the installation of two servers: Windows Server and Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005.

November 19th, 2007

For content providers of any size (even you), Bango button offers frictionless push to mobiles

Posted by David Berlind @ 3:16 pm

Categories: Entertainment, General, Mobile, Personal Technology, Reviewcasts, Software Infrastructure, Telephony, Video, Web technology, Wired & Wireless

Tags: Mobile, Handset, Service, Ray Anderson, Cellular Phones, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, David Berlind

For anybody who has ever tried to retrieve Web-based content on their mobile handset, be it a full-blown smartphone or just one that’s capable of basic Web access via the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), being able to retrieve content on that handset the way its retrievable on the PC are two tasks that are worlds apart. For example, today, you can browse pretty much any Web page and when you see an image you like, you can relatively easily download it to your PC for later viewing or turn it into your wallpaper.

But let’s say you want that image on your mobile handset? The hoops most people must jump through is the equivalent of inserting a square peg into a round hole. Is the content properly formatted for the target handset (eg: if it’s an image, must it be resized?). Is it even possible to browse the Web page in question with your handset and pick off content in a way that can be saved to your handset’s storage for subsequent retrieval?

And what if you’re a content provider that desperately wants people to be able to access the content on your Web pages with their mobile handsets? Maybe teens want to keep pictures of their idols on their cell phones. Or, what can you do to make ringtone search and retrieval much easier? How do you track that behavior and if you want to charge some form of micropayment for license to the content, how would you do that?

Regardless of whether you’re an end user looking to get content for your mobile or a content provider looking to provide it, there’s so much friction involved that only those of us who are mobile masochists are willing to figure it out. Either that, or you take what’s “given” to you by your mobile carrier who goes to great lengths to control the horizontal and vertical (making sure that just about every retrievable bit of content passes through their cash registers first).

With his new “Bango Button,” Bango CEO and co-founder Ray Anderson thinks his company may have found a way to ease the pain for both users and content providers. As you can see in the attached video, the basic premise of the Bango button is that instead of using their handsets to search for or identify content they might want on their handsets, end-users use their PCs. Then, for that content (text, images, audio, video, etc.) that they they want on their handsets, hopefully, there’s a Bango button that when clicked, literally pushes the content to their mobile phones. As you can see in the video, the first time someone uses a Bango button, they’re given a very specific WAP-based URL to visit with their handset. But from that point forward, any other time they use the Bango button, they only need visit WAP.com (a domain operated by Bango) with their phone and they’ll get an index of all the content that they’ve pushed to their handset using Bango buttons from across the Web.

In addition to taking the friction out of getting content to mobile handsets, Bango also handles any specific formatting issues. When Bango sees what kind of handset the end-user is using (something it can detect when the handset visits a Bango-encoded URL), Bango automatically applies any intelligence it has on that handset to the content that the end-user is retrieving. For example, it resizes images to a size that’s ideally suited to the handset’s display. Additionally, if the content provider prefers that some form of micropayment take place before the content is retrieved (for example, with ringtones), Bango provides all the back end billing infrastructure to enable the presentation and collection of those micropayments. In cases where payments are involved, Bango gets a cut.

Downside? Well, there isn’t much in the way of choice for the buttons and of the stock buttons that Bango offers, they aren’t very attractive. In fact, they’re downright ugly. Even stranger, there’s no Bango branding on them. There’s also no way to upload buttons of your own design to the Bango service to make them easily selectable when creating a Bango button that you might put with an image of yourself or someone on your MySpace or other Web page. According to Anderson, Bango is working on a new feature of the service whereby anybody can upload buttons that can be shared.

Another downside? Not every handset or carrier is supported. According to Anderson, certain carriers and handset manufacturers go out of their way to disallow unsanctioned content. Anderson says that Verizon Wireless does this on its BREW-based handsets and cited Apple’s iPhone as another device that users haven’t been able to push audio to.

The service seems very cool. However, I wonder if long term, once more handsets can do the Web better (eg: the way the iPhone does it), if pushing content from the PC to the handset will be a thing of the past. After all, it’s no secret that the number of handset users in the world far outnumbers the number of PC users (by a long shot). But even then, perhaps Bango will be on the back-end making it easier to pick-off content and take the friction out of massaging it for the target device.

November 16th, 2007

Buh-bye hard drive: Box.net's online storage now directly accessible by multiple Web apps

Posted by David Berlind @ 2:00 pm

Categories: General, Office 2.0, Reviewcasts, Software Infrastructure, Video, Web technology

Tags: Google Inc., Google Apps, Web, Hard Drive, Service, Box.net, OpenBox, EchoSign, Storage, Hardware

When I think of the online storage market, I primarily think of 2 1/2 models. The first is the one that’s for developers: services like Amazon’s S3 or AOL’s X-Drive where, through APIs that are programmatically accessed by their applications, software developers hardwire their software to the storage found in Amazon’s datacenter instead of wiring their software to a server in their own datacenter.

The second is where there’s some online storage somewhere that one or more people upload their files to for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons could be online backup. Another could be collaboration. I copy a file to some shared drive in the cloud that you have access to. You go to that shared drive and download it. Fundamentally, there isn’t much difference between this and the remaining 1/2 a model where there’s some shared storage online, but it’s integrated into the application you’re using (where the data is often shared) is transparent to the end user. In other words, the end-user is never really thinking about online storage. An example is Facebook and how you can upload and share files (photos, music, etc.) there. Another example is Google Apps. Whether you’re uploading documents to Google Apps for sharing or creating them right in Google Apps, online storage is playing a key role in your ability to keep those documents online (and collaborate on them through Google Apps collaborative capabilities).

For more than two years, Box.net has been a player in both of the primary models — offering direct access to its online storage through a browser, but also offering APIs so that developers can hardwire Box.net’s online storage directly into their applications. But now, through a new offering that Box.net co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie (pronounced lev-ee) is calling OpenBox comes a completely different model — one where existing online services (for example EchoSign’s online document signing service) are integrated directly into Box.net’s online storage service in turnkey fashion, without the need for a software developer to mashup them (the apps, the storage) up for you. Put another way, whereas before you might have used EchoSign to retrieve and sign a file that was on your local hard drive, now you can say buh-bye hard drive and do the same thing with a file that lives in your Box.net directory.

EchoSign is just one of Box.net’s OpenBox launch partners. The others are as follows:

• eFax
• Autodesk
• Zoho
• ThinkFree
• Scribd
• Picnik
• Zazzle
• Mimeo
• Twitter
• Myxer

In the attached video, I caught up with Levie via our reviewcasting rig (this time, instead of using WebEx, we used the Java-based GoToMeeting.com) who gives us a demonstration of how it works. For example, you can see how the contextual menus in Box.net make it possible to click on a Word document and sign it with EchoSign or to pick an image and edit it with Picnik.

The most impressive thing about the service is how it obviates the need to keep your files in multiple locations. For example, let’s say you use Google Apps to create a PDF document that you want to distribute to customers that are in your salesforce.com database. Normally, the way you might do this is you would create the file in Google Apps, save it in PDF format, download it to your PC and the upload it to salesforce.com before finally sending it out. But let’s say, when originally saving the PDF file, you could save it to your Box.net account directly (instead of to Google’s storage) and then let’s say from salesforce.com, when it came time to send that PDF to a customer, you could access the box.net storage directly. In the latter situation, you’ve taken a huge amount of the friction out of the process because you don’t have to move the file around at all. It is saved, modified, and accessed from one place (in the video Levie says that Box.net is working on the salesforce integration piece… no word on Google Apps yet… I just used that as a really good example of the potential).

What are the downsides? As far as I can tell, cost is the biggie. Box.net will offer anybody 1 gigabyte of storage for free. For box.net to maintain 5GB of storage, the cost is $8 per month and for 15GB, it’s $20/mo. These prices aren’t bad considering the sorts of services that your files can be frictionlessly integrated with. But, cost might come up in the discussion for people already using services like Google Apps. Users of the paid Google Apps service (cost is $50 per user per year) get 25GB of storage (in addition to all the applications that they have access to).

While Google Apps isn’t integrated into OpenBox yet or now, that business model and cost , where the storage is transparently integrated into service for such a low cost sets a precedent that may cause some people to question Box.net’s fees. Bear in mind that the 25GB of storage is mainly e-mail (but some have figured out how to turn it into more general purpose storage). But if you did the math on storage alone, the cost works out to be $2 per GB of storage per year. Under that formula, Box.net’s 15GB storage would cost $30 per year. But under Box.net’s formula, 15GB of storage costs $240 per year. That’s a big difference.

Bear in mind this is a simplistic analysis. It’s not an apples to apples comparison since the the two companies offer entirely different services around their storage infrastructures and Box.net doesn’t necessarily charge organizations on a per user basis the way Google does. As more users are added, Box.net starts to look better. But these are the sorts of analyses that organizations will do when trying to determine the value of services like Google Apps or OpenBox. Quite frankly, I think the OpenBox model is SO cool and innovative that it would behoove Google or Yahoo to acquire it and integrate into their portfolio of offerings. But, given Box.net’s neutrality, that may not be a good idea as all companies (not just Google and Yahoo) look to keep users on their networks as much as possible.

Check out the video.

Related — TechCrunch: Box.net Releases OpenBox Platform for Integration of Web Applications

November 8th, 2007

Laszlo demo: The write once/run anywhere (Flash,DHTML,Java,Silverlight) RIA dev tool?

Posted by David Berlind @ 10:44 am

Categories: General, IT Management, Legal, Mobile, Open Source, Reviewcasts, Software Infrastructure, Video, Web technology

Tags: Desktop, Application, Microsoft Silverlight, DHTML, Platform, Java, Rich Internet Application, Laszlo Systems Inc., Tool, Flash

If you’re like a lot of Web developers who want to turn their static Web sites in to something more rich and interactive (these days, referred to as Rich Internet Applications or RIAs), one of the challenges is in choosing a platform to target. The main choices are Adobe’s Flash, the more standard DHTML/Javascript, Sun’s Java (actually JavaFX), and Microsoft’s Silverlight platform. But, given how much of a strategic investment is required (and how painful it might be to go back to square one in the event your first choice doesn’t work out), which of the four should you pick? Or, will you have to write to multiple platforms in an effort to make sure your application is available on the broadest range of end-user devices. For example, if you pick Adobe’s Flash as your target and suddenly realize that you want your app to run on the iPhone which requires DHTML, the long term costs of maintaining two (or even three codebases) could overwhelm you or your development team.

David Temkin, CTO and co-founder of Laszlo Systems, thinks he’s got the solution to the problem — basically a middleware-for-middleware product that allows Web developers to write their applications in an XML/Javascript-based RIA description language known as OpenLaszlo that in turn can be compiled for any or all of the four primary RIA platforms in such a way that the end-products (the RIAs) are virtually indistinguishable from each other.

To prove his point, you can see Temkin demonstrating an RIA in the reviewcast (above) that was developed once in OpenLaszlo and deployed twice: once to Flash and a second time to DHTML. The application is a rather simple app called LZPics and the user interface looks identical in both cases. In claiming that OpenLaszlo can make the four target platforms do just about anything (except play video), Temkin says that downsampling (finding some lowest common denominator of cross-platform functionality) wouldn’t be required in order to deploy more complicated applications to two or more of the target platforms.

Another reason Temkin thinks OpenLaszlo merits a look by RIA developers: not only does OpenLaszlo take the risk and cost out of writing specifically to one platform or another, he says the language is also far better suited to the task of writing RIAs than the native languages of the target platforms in the first place. For example, he says, DHMTL never had today’s sorts of RIAs in mind. Nor did Flash or Java.

Initially, OpenLaszlo is supporting DHTML and Flash with Java and Silverlight support coming next. The entire platform is open source which is good. But Laszlo Systems has selected what is probably the most insulting open source license of the ones that the Open Source Initiative (the OSI) has blessed: the IBM-authored Common Public License (which even IBM doesn’t select for its projects any more). The problem with the CPL is that it gives the licensor (in this case, Laszlo) a license to steal intellectual property from licensees. Basically, under the CPL, if the licensor infringes on a licensee’s patent that’s completely unrelated to the IP being licensed under the CPL, the licensor gets to revoke the licensee’s license to that IP. For example, if I give you a CPL license to my search algorithm and then you sue me for infringement on your hard drive patent (completely unrelated to the search license), I can revoke your license to my search algorithm.

At first you say, what’s the big deal. But, if you have an entire product line that depends on your license to my search algorithm and I know that, the CPL paves the way for me to infringe on your other IP without fear of reprisals (since there’s no way you can kill your whole product line). Most open source licenses have such terms of mutually assured destruction (MAD) — but it only relates to the IP being licensed and not unrelated intellectual property. It’s basically a license to steal and I personally would never accept anything under the CPL and I shared this opinion with Temkin.

I’m not for a minute implying that Laszlo would do such a thing and I personally think the technology is very cool. But with all the other OSI-approved open source licenses that are ripe for the picking, there is literally no reason to pick the CPL over the others other than its “license to steal” character. There are other open source licenses that accomplish the same thing as the CPL without the out-of-bounds provisos found in the CPL (for example, the Eclipse Public License which is what the Eclipse Foundation moved to, from the CPL, knowing full well that the CPL was a bad license).

Also in the video, Temkin shows us the Laszlo Web Top — a self contained desktop RIA that runs on Flash and into which any Laszlo developed RIA can easily be plugged. The Laszlo Webtop reminds me very much of what Sapotek has done with Desktoptwo by offering what is essentially the functionality of a desktop PC inside of a browser. In other words, there’s a notion of a desktop (in the browser or Flash runtime) with applications that run on it just the same way you have a desktop with applications in one of your more common desktop operating systems (Windows, Mac, Linux). Today, the only applications that ship with the Laszlo Webtop are Mail and Contacts and, much the same way Sapotek is hoping its open source community starts to build applications for Desktoptwo, Laszlo is hoping that an open source community will rally behind the Laszlo Webtop with a library of useful applications.

One big difference between the approaches being taken with Laszlo and Sapotek is that the Laszlo Webtop is a Web-based desktop that organizations would deploy to their users on their own (as opposed to the hosted solution that Sapotek runs). The example he shows in the video is of the Webtop that Verizon is deploying.

October 17th, 2007

Reviewcast: Saleforce.com's Visual Force is like an on-demand version of FoxPro (but better)

Posted by David Berlind @ 10:37 am

Categories: General, IT Management, Reviewcasts, Software Infrastructure, Video, Web technology

Tags: Salesforce.com Inc., Database, On-demand, Storage, Databases, Hardware, Enterprise Software, Software, Data Management, David Berlind

It was just a few weeks ago at salesforce.com’s DreamForce Conference that the company known for its on-demand CRM solutions rolled out force.com and a new development tool it’s calling visualforce. In hopes of getting a demonstration of the product, I caught up with salesforce.com’s vice president of developer marketing Adam Gross for a reviewcast. Reviewcasts, for those of you who have never seen one, involve a unique blend of WebEx style Webcasting, 2-camera videotaping, and usage of a podcasting rig to support a more interactive dialogue where I can ask questions — all of which results in the sort of video that you see above. It’s an experimental format that I’m still working on, but given the feedback we’re getting, it appears to have some legs and I’ll be looking to do many more of these over time.

I got my start in the IT business in the early 80’s as a software developer. I cut my teeth on some Cobol but when I discovered dBase II on the PC, it was like pure oxygen compared to building forms driven database applications on a mainframe using CICS. To a programmer like me, what made dBase special was how quickly I could build and debug custom database applications. The DOS-based software made it simple to build some relational databases and generate rudimentary data entry and viewing forms. But its real power kicked in when you wrote your own custom code and laid-out your own forms. Over time, there was dBase III, dBase IV, and dBase V and then, a variety of third party offerings that worked with dBase databases (.DBF files) and source code in a way that they could be substituted for the dBase software itself. One of those was Foxpro which eventually found its way into Microsoft’s portfolio of development tools as Visual Foxpro. It became the go-to tool for anybody developing PC or LAN-based database applications not just because of its DBF backwards-compatability (dBase files with mission critical data were everywhere), but also because of how easy it was to visually customize the user interface (thus the “visual” in Visual Foxpro).

Visual Foxpro wasn’t alone in this capability to, in the context of a PC, strap wizard-driven or custom user interfaces onto flat or relational databases. There was of course Microsoft’s own Access (at the time, equally configurable for non-mortals), Lotus’ Approach (named after its approachability), and Borland’s Paradox. But that was PC-based stuff. Today, the need to create custom schemas with custom user interfaces is no different (in fact, there’s more demand for it than there’s ever been).

What’s new is the Web and how a growing number of service providers are delivering what was essentially Visual Foxpro, but they’re like hosted versions of it that run in a browser. For example, there’s the database that’s built-into WebEx’s WebOffice, Intuit’s on-demand Quickbase, dabbledb, and Zoho’s database just to name a few. One advantage of these Web-based offerings over the old PC approach is how much simpler it is to roll a database out to a workgroup of users. In phase one, you design and deploy the database. In phase two, you give a URL and some credentials to each user needing access to the application (without going into detail, the PC way of deploying multi-user databases was extremely painful).

But whereas most would probably classify those offerings as software-as-a-service based Web-based database offerings (proficient at data management, forms, and reporting), salesforce.com sees visualforce as a part of a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) strategy. As you can see in the video, Gross walks us through a sample database application (in this case, it’s a blogging app but it could be anything). He shows us the database schema and then several “views” of the the final product. One view, the basic database view, isn’t so friendly. But, through what Gross describes as “pixel-level control over the user experience” (kind of like what you had in Visual Foxpro), the customized views, built using visualforce, are far more friendly and suitable to the context of the database app at hand (again, blogging, but, again, it could be anything).

But beyond this pixel level control is where the PaaS part kicks in. It’s one thing to be able to throw up some forms and reports into a browser as the other offerings do. Sometimes included with that is some multi-user capability and the ability to scale up (both in terms of database size and number of users). But, it’s an entirely different beast once you need to strap some business logic to it and it’s still yet another beast to be able to draw upon a library of business widgets for inclusion in that logic.

As you can see in the video, once your forms are generated, the source code for the pages is easily viewable and includes a mixture of HTML and hooks (called visualforce components) into salesforce.com’s underlying infrastructure. Once your HTML forms have access to an infrastructure like the one salesforce runs, that’s when things start to get interesting. Not only is the sky the limit in terms of integrating business logic into your database app, but you also get to pull on everything from the CRM functionality that’s baked into salesforce.com to the “plug-in” functionality available from third parties through salesforce.com’s AppExchange. For example, if you need volume e-mail capabilities, you could draw upon that functionality from an AppExchange member whose specialty that is, like ExactTarget.

Personally, as a former database and custom app programmer, when I look around the technology industry for places to drop anchor and latch onto an ecosystem, visualforce really reminds me of that aha! moment that I had with dBase, where I (a) instantly saw a quantum leap over the de facto approach to the same problem (IBM CICS on a mainframe with Cobol for the business logic) and (2) felt I had encountered a platform-based ecosystem that had strategic legs (in other words, skills developed for this ecosystem would be highly marketable for the foreseeable future). Bottom line, if I went back to the future and was at that crossroad of deciding what basket to put my eggs in, I’d probably put them in the force.com basket.

October 3rd, 2007

Toshiba's sub-3 lb. projector is a road warrior's dream; a pricey dream, but still a dream

Posted by David Berlind @ 2:29 pm

Categories: General, Hardware Infrastructure, Mobile, Personal Technology, Reviewcasts, Video, Wired & Wireless

Tags: Projector, Idea, Staples Inc., Toshiba Corp., Construction, Printers, Hardware, Peripherals, David Berlind

Earlier this year, I headlined a post “If it consumes consumables (ie: ink, bulbs, etc), check their cost too before buying it.” That’s why, while at the Digital Life show in New York City last week, one of the question you’ll see me asking during my video interview of Toshiba’s projector product marketing manager Jane Poon how much it costs to replace the lamp on the company’s latest ultraportable projector — the TDP-PX10. Answer? $249. The projector itself has an MSRP of $999. Personally speaking, I’m always a bit outraged when I find out how the consumables for some device cost 25 percent or more of the original price of the device. The worst case scenario is my HP 2600n Color LaserJet. My local Sam’s Club stocked the printer at a discount price but not the color cartridges. Staples has the color cartridges. Their total cost actually exceeds the cost of the printer itself (which comes new with a full complement of cartridges). Every time I run out of ink, it’s cheaper just to buy a new printer. Go figure.

Poon points out that there are ways to get more mileage out of the lamps. In other words, with fewer pitstops over time, the total cost of ownership is reduced. But it involves dropping the projector down into what she called its economy mode. One of the highlights of the projector (for one so small) is that it drives a whopping 2200 lumens which means you don’t need a dark room for the projector to cast a decent image onto a wall or screen. And, when you think about it, the way its light weight positions it for someone like a traveling salesperson, it’s not like someone is going to be relying on it to light up a giant wall from 40 feet away in a conference room. That said, to make the lamp last longer, users will have to sacrifice brightness (in other words, some number of lumens) when setting the PX10 for its economy mode.

On a positive note, the projector also has a USB port on its rear panel that’s designed to accomodate a USB-key that has one or more PowerPoint presentations on it. The idea is that instead of hauling both the projector and a PC around, you can just bring a projector and a USB key. In addition to supporting PowerPoint, the PX10 can work with JPG images as well.

Near the end of the video, I also caught one of Toshiba’s “short-throw” projectors in action. A short-throw projector is one that can be placed close to a wall, but still cast a very large image onto the wall. That projector is also WiFi-enabled which means that a PC can transmit its presentation to the projector via wireless.

October 1st, 2007

Sapotek's free Browser-based desktop OS (complete with apps) launches this month

Posted by David Berlind @ 11:09 am

Categories: General, Google Apps To-Do List, IT Management, Office 2.0, Open Source, Personal Technology, Reviewcasts, Software Infrastructure, Video, Web technology

Tags: Desktop OS, Desktop, Developer, Google Inc., Google Apps, Ingersoll-Rand, Operating System, Web Browser, Sapotek, Desktoptwo

While in New York City last week for Digital Life, I stole some time to head down to TechSpace in Greenwich Village (the “Silicon Valley of Manhattan”) where I interviewed (on video) Joshua Rand, co-founder and president of startup Sapotek: the soon-to-launch provider of a free browser-based desktop operating system that comes complete with the applications that most people need. In Spanish, “Sapo” means frog toad. Frogs Toads can only move forward which is the only direction Rand envisions Sapotek heading. Thus, the name.

One of the challenges for Sapotek will be in positioning the service, especially with all the noise around the browser-based application space right now. In the attached video interview, Rand says one big difference between Sapotek and Google (with Google Apps) is the way that Google Apps focuses on the Web delivery of productivity applications whereas Sapotek not only goes after all the other important things a desktop does (eg: storage, MP3 playing, etc.), but integrating them too using a metaphor (a graphical desktop) that most users are comfortable with. For example, when creating documents in the VNC-delivered version of OpenOffice that’s included with Desktoptwo, users can seemlessly save their documents to Desktoptwo’s “hard drive” which, for all intents and purposes is just 1GB of free online storage.

One of the first things that caught my eye about Desktoptwo wasn’t the very complete menu of applications it makes available to users — the VNC-based access to OpenOffice, a “hard drive”, e-mail, and RSS reader, blog authoring and hosting, a jack-of-all services instant messaging client, message boards and more — but rather that the environment and the applications (with the exception of OpenOffice) are written in Flash. This means that the service is browser independent and will work on just about any platform that supports the Flash runtime.

Just as interesting is the fact that all of the applications have been open sourced as a part of an open source community that Sapotek hosts called Sapodesk. Longer term, much the same way developers can build applications for other desktop operating systems (eg: Windows, Mac, Linux), Sapotek is encouraging developers to write software that works on Desktoptwo. To bootstrap the process, Sapotek has open sourced its own applications and, as a result, Rand says that developers aren’t just making modifications to Sapotek’s offerings, they’re also writing their own apps. Today however, because the service is still in beta, developers cannot load the publicly available service with their third party apps. Sapotek oversees what apps (and/or modifications to its standard apps) make it into the publicly available “distribution.” Being able to pull third party apps into Desktoptwo — reminiscent somewhat of the way salesforce.com’s AppExchange functions (you choose applications from third party developers that you can then pull into your salesforce.com desktop) — is in the works according to Rand.

This open source aspect to Desktoptwo may turn out to be one of the key differentiators between what Sapotek has to offer, and what some of the other players like Google Apps have. Functionality-wise and even from a user-interface perspective, I don’t see major strategic differences between offerings like Desktoptwo and Google Apps. Today, Desktoptwo has done a much better job of integrating what’s available into a single easy to understand graphical user interface. Google on the other hand has the various bits and pieces in its portfolio, but they’re not integrated. Yet. Check back in five years and the pieces that aren’t a part of Google Apps (eg: the RSS Reader) will probably be more tightly integrated an the user interface that pulls it all together will be much more polished.

But when it comes to cultivating an ecosystem of developers, Sapotek’s approach is very different. Whereas Sapotek is trying to establish an open source ecosystem around its platform, Google takes a more API driven approach. The source code to that core functionality that those APIs access (behind Google’s firewalls) is not nearly as accessible for derivative work as a fully open sourced application. So, there are differences.

Anyway, in the video, you’ll get to see Desktoptwo in action, hear Rand talk passionately about the product and its direction (today, there’s no organization-targeted version of it the way Google Apps is essentially an organization-targeted version of Google Docs & Spreadsheets) and see the business model behind the service (ad supported with fees for storage beyond the 1GB).

Disclosure: Sapotek is an exhibitor at Startup Camp which is an event that’s produced by an event production company I co-founded called Mass Events Labs. That’s how I came to know of its services. However, exhibiting at Startup Camp involved no payment of sponsorship fees by Sapotek whatsoever. Sapotek exhibited at Startup Camp 2 in May of this year on the basis of a free invitation, and will be doing so again at the third Startup Camp later this month.

September 25th, 2007

Via OpenSearch, IBM & ProgrammableWeb take pain out of finding, adding widgets to mashups

Posted by David Berlind @ 12:37 pm

Categories: General, IT Management, Reviewcasts, Software Infrastructure, Video, Web technology

Tags: IBM Corp., Mashup, David Berlind

In this, our fourth experimental ” reviewcast” (a videocast review of software or Web-based solutions that uses a combination of video cameras, still images, a WebEx-esque remotely delivered demo, and audio from our podcasting rig), I take a look at a newly announced collaboration involving the mashup development tools from IBM (Mashup Maker and Mashup Hub) and the ever-evolving directory of APIs and other mashup consumables that can be found at programmableweb.com.

Generally speaking, mashups are a type of Internet-based software that usually runs in a browser and draws upon two or more distinctly separate entities (often domains) for functionality and/or data. The most popular form of mashup today involves mapping functionality from Google Maps and global positioning or street intersection data from databases with the final user interface looking like a Google Map with virtual pins in it. One of the most commonly discussed mashups to exemplify this combination is chicagocrime.org: a searchable Web-site that shows the precise location of crimes that have taken place in the Chicago metropolitan area. But there are many many others.

To draw upon functionality found elsewhere (for example functionality found in Google Maps), mashups usually rely on application programming interfaces (APIs, a type of mashup consumable): interfaces that when called upon by a programmer from within a mashup’s source code, return some specific function into the mashup application itself. In business environments where resusability is often excercised through the internal availability of such consumables, the tools coming into the marketplace from companies like BEA and IBM include a registry of reusable consumables that can be quickly and easily incorporated into the mashup development process. To the programmer, it’s like having a card catalog of approved widgets at their fingertips, in the context of their development environments.

But as more corporate and business developers begin to look outside the firewall for functionality on the public Internet that can be drawn into their business mashups, the likelihood that those consumables will be listed in their local registries is low. Enter ProgrammableWeb.com. Since founding ProgrammableWeb.com, not only has John Musser been cataloging all the mashups that are out there, he has also been cataloging all the APIs and consumables that they use.

Surely, with mashup development tools like IBM’s behind corporate firewalls and directories of consumable APIs like ProgrammableWeb, there’s a way to bridge the two in such a way that developers can find mashup consumables that are relevant to the mashups they’re developing (without leaving the context of development environments such as IBM’s QEDWiki-based collaborative Mashup Maker).

Enter OpenSearch. First developed by Amazon.com, the best description of OpenSearch that I found is on Wikipedia and says “a collection of technologies that allow publishing of search results in a format suitable for syndication and aggregation.” When the “client” (in this case IBM’s Mashup Maker) uses the same search interface that’s expected by the server (in this case ProgrammableWeb), all the friction is taken out of pulling structured results into the client side application (again, in this case, Mashup Maker) in a way that’s contextually relevant to the developer. Using our reviewcasting rig, this functionality is shown in the above video with John Musser and IBM mashup enabler Dan Gisolfi working the controls.

By supporting OpenSearch as a means of retrieving structured descriptive data about mashup consumables, ProgrammableWeb has made it possible for developers using IBM’s Mashup Maker to locate relevant APIs and integrate them into their applications without having to leave the context of their development environment. More importantly, their reliance on the Creative Commons-licensed OpenSearch instead of some proprietary interface for exchanging structured data in the context of a free text search could be a huge evolutionary step forward for not just the mashup ecosystem, but for the software development ecosystem on the whole which, over time, will come to rely more and more on functionality and data through API-accessible services.

While OpenSearch could turn out to be the missing link between development tools and the virtual public repository of consumables that they draw upon, this collaboration and proof of concept between IBM and Programmable Web probably scratches the surface of what could be the end game. For example, today, as can be seen in the above video, the descriptive data that Mashup Maker pulls into its development environment is relatively basic. If more companies on both the tool and consumable side embrace what IBM and ProgammableWeb have started, not only might the software community end up with some sort of defacto open standard on its hands, I could see that community using consensus to evolve the level of detail that directories of consumables return to tools like IBM’s Mashup Maker.

At the same time, it’s exactly that sort of industry wide interest that’s needed for this OpenSearch-based approach to take off. For the time being, it is limited to the interaction between IBM’s tools and ProgrammableWeb.com. But should other tool makers like BEA and Serena embrace the idea from the client-side, and should other directory providers on the server side support it as well, that’s when things could start to get really interesting.

Disclosure: IBM is a sponsor of Mashup Camp which is an event produced by Mass Events Labs. I am co-owner of Mass Events Labs. IBM’s sponsorship was not a factor in posting this reviewcast to the Web. Prior to doing a video of this mashup development tool in action, I recorded and published video of solutions from two of IBM’s competitors in the enterprise mashup tool space — BEA and Serena — neither of which were Mashup Camp sponsors.