Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Open Courseware from MIT

MIT provides excellent learning resources on the web through its MIT OpenCourseWare initiative. Plenty of courses from many different fields... It has assignments, lecture notes, study materials and the like.

Good example of using technology to provide great but otherwise restricted access resources to a large audience. They have provided a comprehensive how-to section to help others replicate this effort.

posted by bkajay @ 4:16 AM 0 comments

Top eBusiness Trends for 2005

Information Week talks about top eBusiness Trends as per eMarketer

The full list of E-business trends is:

  • Alternative advertising
  • RSS
  • Changes in AOL business model
  • On-Demand TV
  • Wireless broadband
  • RFID
  • VoIP
  • Linux
  • Cross-channel retailing
  • IT security

posted by bkajay @ 1:55 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

URL Info from Fagan Finder

URL Info is a great site to find out everything about a URL.

It has 107 tools! Can even do translations...

posted by bkajay @ 11:30 PM 0 comments

Thursday, March 17, 2005

IT as a utility

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz draws a parallel between IT and the Electrical Industry to explain the the three phases that any technology goes through...
  • customization
  • standardization
  • utilization

posted by bkajay @ 1:15 AM 0 comments

Wednesday, March 16, 2005

SOA's killer app

InfoWorld talks highly about Rearden Commerce's EBS (Employee Business Services).

Essentially, EBS is a container of application services with no vanilla version. By default, customers use EBS' application framework to whip together -- without coding -- browser-based purchasing applications tailored to their company's business rules, processes, and employee roles.

The result is a services marketplace that wraps itself around the identity and permissions of individual business users, automating, centralizing, and controlling purchases that in most organizations remain slapdash. Carriers' shipping prices can be compared side by side, air travel rules can be enforced at the user level, audio- and videoconferencers can get the best rates, and so on -- all through a unified Web app that runs on anything from a desktop to a smartphone.

posted by bkajay @ 11:44 PM 0 comments

Pervasive architectures

Interesting article on Pervasive architectures : "Enterprise environments are being designed for anytime, anywhere access to company resources, apps, and data."

“It’s the death of the business day,” says Jeff Schulman, vice president of architecture at Gartner. “The old model was shutdown and batch catch-up; now it’s seven by 24. There’s a dynamism here that really pushes on our architectures. In real-time mode, there are responsiveness issues and issues around capacity.”
Schulman also claims that in this pervasive future, everything will be addressable and the state of everything will be fully known. “If there is this level of profound connectivity, from an architectural standpoint, there’s a very different level of managing resources, of understanding state, of process optimization, and even of governance,” he says. “And there’s lots of privacy and security issues to be wrestled with.”


How should enterprise architects prepare for this coming pervasive future? “Pervasive is a side effect of doing everything Web-exposed and middleware-driven,” CareGroup’s Halamka says. “My programmers these days are experts in the glue, which is what allows us to create what feels like an integrated product even though the parts may be very different.”


In other words, leverage a unified back end to serve multiple channels, devices, and formats.

posted by bkajay @ 11:36 PM 0 comments

Robots getting popular

Hitachi unveils 'fastest robot' - Article that talks about the progress in robotics.

By 2007, it is predicted that there will be almost 2.5 million "entertainment and leisure" robots in homes, compared to about 137,000 currently, according to the United Nations (UN)

posted by bkajay @ 10:44 PM 0 comments

Virtual meetings

Computerworld Article focusing on Centra's e-meeting, Documentum's eRoom, Groove networks' (now MS) Virtual Office - gains in productivity, saves money...

Centra has done a very nice job of capturing a familiar user model," O'Kelly says. "So if I'm used to facilitating meetings with groups of people, I find familiar concepts when using a tool like Centra -- like there's a podium, and there might be a seating chart, and people can raise their hands."

posted by bkajay @ 8:59 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Skype hype

Interesting interview with Skype CEO

Skype is growing extremely rapidly: We have 29 million users and are adding 155,000 users each day. Most of them run the software on their computers, but we
also have around 1.3 million Pocket PC users.

posted by bkajay @ 11:47 PM 0 comments