Cheesy Trance

I know I am not acting my age or anything but sometimes I like to revisit the past and this track pretty much does it for me. I want a beach, a sunrise and some wonderfully smooth trance. Wonder if they will be playing this stuff when I am retired and go on a "Trance Music revival" - lol

Anglican Church goes Open

A bit of a buzz among the IBM community about the recent article about the Anglican Church in Sydney to use Lotus Symphony over and above MS Office. Have a look at the video below and listen to George Lymbers chat about how he wants to move away from licensed software.

Reading between the lines this chap wants to use Open Source software that doesn't have any license costs but does have a support structure - just in case a problem needs to be fixed. As software and the qualities of service of running software e.g. scalability, resilience, performance etc becomes a commodity then this model looks likely to become more and more popular.

It increases the pressure on software houses to develop more innovative and value added software capabilities while moving chunks of older function into the open source communities but does this only apply to on-premise software?

I would argue no to that point, if soho, google, cloudo can start to deliver higher quality offerings from the cloud then the business model becomes a flat charge for storage, power, bandwidth and maintenance and everything else including the software is free......

Following on from this train of thought why will people develop high quality software - for fun, kudos, because they can? or would it be to drive volume business on cloud computing sites?

The question arises, what will be the next generation of value added services that software vendors can actually charge customers for? Todays innovative products become tomorrows commodity - what's next?

Mixin

@gapingvoid shared a link to mixin which does for time what dopplr does for geography. Check out the video.

You can add your activities by time using IM, twitter, email, SMS and say when you'll be available and where you'll be.

The video then takes you through an activity, what are you doing, where will you be and when will you be there and you can invite any of your friends. Each activity is a conversation incorporating images video and audio - very much like a life-stream feed. You can also discover other people - as you might expect.

I like it as a tool but I am too loyal to twitter to move to anything else right now.


mixin presentation from mixin on Vimeo.

Widget: Kiwilight

I was looking for a widget to add to this blog site when I stumbled upon Widgetbox. Loads of useful widgets on here that I will use over time. The purpose of this post is to share with you a widget that I created in about 30 seconds called the Kiwi light widget. You can have a widget on your blog or website that shows content from this blog - how much more luckier could you be!?

So take a look, play with it, and then probably throw it on the scrap heap of useless ideas!! Alternatively you may sing my praises to the heavens and embed, embed, embed!!

Cisco Telepresence

Cisco Telepresence 3000 is cool.

I spent a really enjoyable day meeting with Cisco and as part of this seminar we were treated to an overview of the Cisco Telepresence 3000.

You walk into a room which is dominated by three huge plasma screens arranged in a semi circle. Infront of the screens is a table and six chairs with a Cisco IP desktop phone. The room is painted a "poo" brown. - not very nice. When you buy telepresence you buy the room including all the furnishings etc. this means that every telepresence room looks the same so even if you are using telepresence with other companies you still get the feeling that you are around the same table,

You arrange yourself on the very comfortable chairs and the touch screen desk phone has meeting details highlighted on it. You simply touch the meeting details and the three screens come to life and hey-presto you are in a telepresence meeting with Singapore or Tokyo or the Moon.

The quality of the video stream is fantastic. The person in Singapore looks like they are the other side of the desk - there isn't any audio or video lag - quality all the way.

As the presenter in Singapore talked and moved from one side of his room to the other the audio reflects that by changing the way that we hear where the sound is coming from - this is Cisco Intellectual property at work in the speakers.

Behind the screen is a bank of subtle lighting which ensures that the participants faces are always lit up and easy to see. Very important when we realise that a huge amount of our communication is non-verbal.

Integration with all pre-existing video conferencing solutions is available.

It is just a fantastic solution - expensive (US$300k) for sure but worth a look especially if you are an executive who consistently travels long distances.

OpenSocial

I am presenting at the Technical Leadership Exchange (TLE) in Sydney in August. I have chosen to talk about Profile 2.0. This is really about a users profile being the common denominator of Web 2.0 because all things seem to eventually get down to who are you, do I know you, do I trust you?

The industry needs an open standards solution that addresses identity. From this point we can then deal with the problems of ownership of data and portability of data.

As part of my research which I am doing today I have been looking at dataportability, OpenID and OpenSocial. I wanted to share with you the YouTube video from the launch of OpenSocial. It takes you through a few examples of where OpenSocial has been used. Essentially OpenSocial is SOA for Social Networks. It provides a common framework and APIs that allow developers to write code once and use multiple times. The pre-req is that the social network that you wish to write an application for supports OpenSocial. Initial assessment would indicate that all the big players such as Google, Facebook, myspace, Ning, LinkedIn etc support it so it may well become the standard.

Enjoy the Video, its long!

Gimp 2.4 - Image Manipulation

I shared the Enterprise Mashups presentation to a few of my work colleagues the other day. On one of the slides I have a picture of a cheetah's tail and a graph of the long-tail as shown here.

One of my colleagues Chris Eaton pointed out that it would be better if I could flip the picture horizontally. I thought that was a great idea but commented back that I didn't have a copy of Adobe. Chris then kindly slapped me around the face and sent me the link to gimp.

Using this free tool I managed to flip the picture so that the tail lines up more-or-less with the graph of the long tail. All about the details?

DIGG recommendation engine

Digg has finally released its recommendation engine. As users have incresed digg-ing news item to digg the vast number has made it difficult to know what to look at. The Digg engine matches your digg entries with other digg users to try and suggest or recommend content that is being digged by those users.

Digg Recommendation Engine from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.


Lotus Connections has a similar notion. When I look at My bookmarks within Lotus Connections Dogear (tagging) component the system correlates the tags I am interested in with other IBM employees irrespective of their location or business unit. This allows me to make contact with colleagues who have similar interests to me which is useful when you are trying to develop your knowledge network. This group of people may share other interests with you as well so a really cool feature.

The future of the Content

I just found this video researching on techcrunch what a prosumer is and how we qualify that definition. 

Welcome to the Web 2.0 Revolution!!

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