Feature

Google Responds to the Bing Challenge

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 11:30:00 EST

"At Google, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments at any given time on Google sites all over the world," notes a Google spokesman in a recent statement on The Google Official Blog. "Right now, we are running a small experiment of a new Google homepage design that shows links when a user mouses over the screen. This is just a test and a way for us see whether our users will celebrate an even simpler search interface."

Interview with Presence Networks' Mike Lagunowitsch

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 07:00:00 EST

It was a clear, very beautiful morning in Sydney. Mike brought the Pitts biplane up to about 4,500ft, and you could literally reach out and touch the mountains from the open cockpit and passenger seat. I came close to better appreciating the words of the classic poem that is understood by pilots, and very few others.

Open Source Compliance: Getting Started Guide

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 21:45:00 EST

This article discusses Open Source compliance and the challenges faced when establishing a compliance program, provides an overview of best practices, and offers recommendations on how to deal with compliance inquiries.

Drupal Tip to Enable Clean URLs on Mac OS

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 06:15:00 EDT

Here's a little Drupal Tip O' the Day for our readers. As many of you know, we're platform agnostic here at Orchestra (meaning we run Macs, Linux, Windows and more), so we often end up discovering little tricks and tips about our different OSes. For those of you building a Drupal website from a Mac, this a handy bit of info.

Six Tips for Successful Online Marketing

Sun, 30 Aug 2009 17:15:00 EDT

Online marketing is under heavy pressure to be all things to a target market in the ways that market wants them to be—right now. Instant marketing, on-demand pressure and today's culture of constant change impact not just the speed, but the quantity of content you need to create continuously to lift engagement. There's no downtime anymore. Create a campaign, send it out, monitor real-time results, tweak your strategy, add new content to your website, blog, create webinars, podcasts and compelling events that engage buyers. Oh, and don't forget to give sales better conversational briefs, customer stories and buyer profiles that fit with those personas it took you painstaking hours to develop..

What Is Service Orientation?

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 10:30:00 EDT

Businesses tend to focus their architecture on efficiency instead of agility. This clear distinction between optimising for the known versus optimising for the unknown inherently counteracts on businesses in their effort to seize any of the new opportunities that arises around them. This article emphasises the importance of architecting enterprise wide systems with quality capabilities and a service orientation that more properly reflects business agility and enables new opportunities to create much more focused, efficient, and adaptable organisational structures.

SOA in the Cloud - Monitoring and Management for Reliability

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 18:15:00 EDT

Organizations looking to reduce integration costs are increasingly adopting a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to maximize their IT investment. The preeminence of Web services as a tool that can support a wide range of dynamic business processes has made it the SOA tool of choice.

Nokia’s Qt and the Open Road to Code

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 11:00:00 EDT

With the pending acquisition of Sun by Oracle and speculation over whether a new stream of monetization is about to tarnish and dishonor the good name of open source, industry eyes are watching the open code zone more keenly than ever to try and gauge whether a new playing field is about to surface.

Google's GDrive Cloud Storage Offering "Coming Soon"

Wed, 20 May 2009 14:45:00 EDT

There has been a lot of talk this week about a new cloud storage service being rolled out by Google as part of their Google App Engine offering. The announcement was part of a presentation at the Interop Conference in Las Vegas, by Mike Repass, Product Manager at Google who indicated it would be made available 'within weeks'.

Maximizing Internet Connectivity

Fri, 01 May 2009 14:00:00 EDT

The definition of remote working is changing. Whether an employee is telecommuting or working at a branch office, they require the same connectivity to headquarters, to each other, and to business applications such as inventory and sales data. Many SMEs use the Internet to provide connectivity across the WAN and it behooves them to keep Internet uptime at a maximum; however, many SMEs feel that the cost of availability is too expensive.

Building Private and Hybrid Clouds with Ubuntu 9.04

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 20:00:00 EDT

Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) has been released today bringing highly interesting new features, specially in the Cloud Computing and Virtualization area. The new Ubuntu server distribution includes two complementary cloud tools, OpenNebula and Eucalyptus, so providing the technology required to build the three types of Cloud architectures, namely private, hybrid and public clouds.

How to Circumvent the Seven Deadly Biases

Fri, 16 Jan 2009 05:55:00 EST

More is better, right? Wrong. In "The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less," Barry Schwartz explains how too many options actually cause more psychological distress. And nowhere is the overabundance of choice more prevalent than the Internet, where any given website can present us with an overwhelming number of alternatives at once.

API-Oriented Web Development: The Concept of a Web API

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 13:30:00 EST

The Web is slowly changing from a visual resource designed to externalize information to people, to a non-visual resource that's able to facilitate machine-to-machine communications. The catalysts of this change are non-visual communications that are enabled using APIs, or Application Programming Interfaces. These APIs allow you to leverage within your own application both behavior and data that somebody else has built and hosted, as if both the functionality and information were local.

The Web API Expert: The Emerging ProgrammableWeb API

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:00:00 EDT

In the last two columns we talked about the emerging platform of the Web, and the use of Web APIs found through directories. Now I have something to show you that lives up to that hype, in essence a layer of technology, on-demand, that lives between the API provider and the API consumer, which is an API itself. It's the ProgrammableWeb API, which is an API-enabled registry/repository that allows you to find and access thousands of existing APIs out there.

Web API Expert: Why Web API Directories Are the New Search Engines

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 17:15:00 EDT

Last week we launched a new column called “Web API Expert,” in essence, to provide a deeper focus on the emerging number of Web APIs out there, and show how to leverage them for mashups or other applications. This is the most exciting and interesting area of the emerging Web right now, and the more you understand what’s coming, the better you can take advantage.

Google’s Position in AOL Turns Rancid

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:00:00 EDT

Google has told the SEC that its billion-dollar acquisition of 5% of AOL, made in 2005 to prevent Microsoft from doing it and giving AOL a $20 billion over-the-top valuation, “may be impaired,” accounting-speak for it ain’t worth what it was (if it ever was).

Engelbart's Usability Dilemma: Efficiency vs Ease-of-Use

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 09:15:00 EDT

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

How OpenSocial Complements Silverlight

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 08:45:00 EST

To take advantage of the OpenSocial implementation in Orkut sandbox, you have to create a Google Gadget with the OpenSocial feature, post the gadget on the Internet, and then add the URL of the gadget as an application. As I looked into the Google gadget API to build this, I found something interesting, the Google Gadget framework exposes the function _IG_FetchContent() that can be used to asynchronously fetch the text at any URL.

Microsoft Silverlight Jives With Google's OpenSocial

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 04:00:00 EST

So what kind of real social networking applications would Silverlight enable? Would it be network visualization or media playback or mash-ups? Google with its Orkut online community (a closed-source ASP.Net application) created an API for social applications so that developers can build applications that can then run inside other social networking applications. They then opened up the specification for that API to other social networking applications so that all other social networking sites can (if they want to) make their sites containers for third-party applications. So I started playing with it.

Google's OpenSocial: A Technical Overview and Critique

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 02:45:00 EST

One of the Google folks working on OpenSocial sent me a message via Facebook asking what I thought about the technical details of the recent announcements. Since my day job is working on social networking platforms for Web properties at Microsoft and I'm deeply interested in RESTful protocols, this is something I definitely have some thoughts about. Below is what started off as a private message but ended up being long enough to be its own article.

Fifty Million Facebook Users Don't Care About Google's OpenSocial APIs

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 02:30:00 EST

There are 50 million Facebook users who don't know what OpenSocial APIs are...and don't care. There are about 5,000 tech bloggers and developers who think it is a revolution that will 'Checkmate' Facebook and leave them with no moves. TechMeme has over 100 stories saying that OpenSocial is awesome and Facebook is dead. MySpace joins Google on OpenSocial initiative. OK, surely that settles it, Facebook is toast. Nope, not in my opinion.

How to Create a Gadget for Google Desktop

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 19:15:00 EDT

Have you played with Google's Desktop tool? This is basically a strip on the side of your screen that lets you house small applications, called Gadgets. The tool is available for Windows, Linux and Mac so no matter your vice there is a flavour for you. There is a wide variety of Gadgets available, ranging from the usual news tickers and clocks right through to games and even being able to vote if a girl is hot or not!

AJAXWorld 2006 West Power Panel with Google's Adam Bosworth

Sat, 30 Sep 2006 11:45:00 EDT

Six of the Web's brightest and best minds - Google's Adam Bosworth, Laszlo Systems founder David Temkin, coiner of the term 'AJAX' Jesse James Garrett, Paul Rademacher of HousingMaps.com and Google, Web 2.0 Journal editor-in-chief Dion Hinchcliffe and Microsoft MVP Sahil Malik - wrestle with a host of issues in this 'AJAX Power Panel' moderated by SYS-CON Media Group Publisher and Editorial Director, Jeremy Geelan.

i-Technology Blog: Google Trends on Java, McNealy, AJAX, and SOA Give Pause For Thought

Fri, 12 May 2006 09:15:00 EDT

Like so many of the ideas that tumble out of the Googleplex into the public domain, Google Trends is irresistible. Jeremy Geelan puts the application, newly taken out of beta and now available to all cyberspace from the Google main page, through its paces by taking it out for a giddy spin around the i-Technology world. The results are surprising...