Day Software has expanded its presence in the social media and open source markets with the acquisition of the founders and key innovators of Mindquarry, an open source collaborative software platform provider. Alexander Klimetschek, Alexander Saar and Lars Trieloff, experts in social media and collaboration, have joined Day's product development team.

Marketing online isn't as easy as it used to be. Back in the day, all we had to do was write some slick ad copy and hand it over to the Webmaster to be published online. If these pages somehow made their way onto one of the various search engines, it was a pleasant bonus. Today, copy is called content, Webmasters are called engineers, and the goal is making the first page of Google, which is trading at nearly $700 per share.

Alfresco Software, the open source ECM play, is now Alfresco, the trendy open source Social Computing Platform for the enterprise. The content-searching REST-enabled apotheosis has been made possible by Alfresco integrating its ECM software with the 'happening' Web 2.0 tools and services like Facebook, iGoogle, Adobe Flex, Skype, RSS Readers, TypePad, MediaWiki and WordPress. That way it can bring Web 2.0 social networking into the workplace, and business, in turn, can quickly tap into the 'wisdom of the crowds,' it says.

SAP, in a Salesforce-beware move, has Web 2.0'd its next-generation CRM 2007 kit so it'll work on Apple iPhones and load business contacts, info on prospects and account data. It told Reuters, which was in Boston for the unveiling, that it was responding to demand and that businesspeople prefer the iPhone to the Blackberry, Treo or Microsoft-based devices. The widgetry, which uses a drag-and-drop interface adapted from Google's iGoogle, is due out later this month. SAP will do the hosting. CRM 2007 also runs on more conventional devices like PCs.

A Bangalore start-up named InstaColl, co-founded, chaired and underwritten by Sabeer Bhatia, who did HotMail, which Microsoft bought in 1997 for a reported $400 million, has launched into the Office business sorta like Google, Zoho, Adobe et al with some hybrid online/offline widgetry called Live Documents. Live Documents, which unfortunately isn't live, is a suite of online productivity apps that its creators claim is the functional equivalent of Word, Excel and PowerPoint in Office 2007 matching features such as Excel's macros and table styles and PowerPoint's live preview.

We believe this is a great opportunity,' said Andrew Paulson, CEO of international media company SUP, as it was announced today that Six Apart - which acquired LiveJournal in January 2005 from its founder, Brad Fitzpatrick - has sold LJ to Moscow-based SUP. SUP has launched an American company, LiveJournal, Inc., to manage and operate LiveJournal globally.

The study contains two parts: an in-depth examination of the online customer experience and an in-depth examination of technical quality or 'service levels' (site responsiveness and site reliability) of the leading news Web sites including AOL News, CNN, FOX News, Google News, MSNBC, USA Today, and Yahoo! News. The unique data and insights uncovered by Keynote Competitive Research are acquired through the use of the company's commercially available Web performance and customer experience test and measurement products. The study is available for purchase from Keynote.

Within minutes of my blog entry, I received the strangest email notification, alerting me to another blog written by Alan Zeichick, 'co-founder and editorial director of BZ Media, which publishes SD Times and Software Test & Performance, and which also produces the Software Security Summit, Software Test & Performance Conference, and EclipseWorld. Also president and principal analyst of Camden Associates.' That's what his bio says.

My money is on targeting iPhones and WM devices until Android actually shows up live and in the wild on more than 500,000 devices. Also, don't be fooled about the Android developer challenge. That's not $10million in prize money, that's a $10 million bribe in order to obtain the critical mass of engaged developers they know will be required for anything useful to come out of the Android project. If they don't have truckloads of developers begging to get their apps onto the phone, their framework will fail and all the mobile partners will go back to business as usual.

Jack Martin today announced Collaborative Democracy, which is a political framework where electors and the elected actively collaborate to attain the best possible solution to any situation using collaborative enabling technologies to facilitate wide scale citizen participation in government. Collaborative Democracy brings all people into the governing process to help civilization reach its full potential. The basic technological building blocks to enable Collaborative Democracy now exist and all that is required is that they be threaded together in a way that an average citizen can use them productively.

'The GigaSpaces XAP software allows programmers to build an application in a way that as demand grows, it can easily be met with zero architecture or code changes. You just throw in another box into your infrastructure and it scales linearly,' said Geva Perry, chief marketing officer of GigaSpaces, as the company this month announced the GigaSpaces Start-Up Program - providing qualified companies and individuals with full, free and perpetual use of the company's flagship product, GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP).

Today, I'm going to explain how to save some steps by downloading the latest build of the OpenJFX Compiler rather than building it on your machine. If you decided not to build the compiler because it looked like a hassle, then relax - this is a lot easier. Just follow the instructions on the PlanetJFX page entitled How to Download the Latest Compiler Build Instead of Building It.

So here's the idea... Imagine Digg in the old days, when there were just 25 people using it. Maybe that wasn't enough. Maybe it didn't really get interesting until there were 100 users or 250 or 1000. It was good, the articles were gems, things we weren't finding on our own, there were huge numbers of them, but they were prioritized, and the community had a heart of gold, people were doing it for love. The maturity level was high. But then something happened as Digg grew from 100 users to 100,000 and more. I'm not going to characterize it other than to say that it stopped being interesting to me as it grew. The stories weren't what I was looking for.

In his opening keynote address yesterday, Software AG Deputy CTO Miko Matsumura challenged an SOA World audience to make service-oriented architecture (SOA) core to their enterprise operations over the coming year. Citing the transformational success of earlier adopters, Matsumura argued that current laggards risked ceding an insurmountable advantage to their competitors if they did not accelerate their adoption of SOA. He also urged attendees to look beyond today?s often artificial litmus tests for architectural purity in order to embrace a more pragmatic and evolutionary approach to SOA adoption.

Here are my thoughts on this. I was expecting Alfred - who is known to be an arrogant and incompetent CEO - to run away from Larry as fast as he could. But this movie usually ends as follows. First, history repeats itself. By that I mean that Alfred should remember Larry's PeopleSoft hunt, which ended up with the PeopleSoft's CEO's head on a stick. In my humble opinion, in Act 2 of Larry's BEA hunt, we will see Alfred's head on a stick and the BEA shareholders will make the wedding plans, as always happens when Larry plans another marriage for his baby Oracle.

JackBe has announced enterprise mashup support for Oracle Fusion Middleware. JackBe's enterprise mashup platform - Presto, a family of products for enterprise mashup solutions that combines SOA and AJAX into enterprise mashups and rich Internet applications - allows users to create dynamic mashups from Oracle enterprise information sources, helping to increase employee productivity, improve the ROI of corporate assets, and ultimately build competitive advantage for the enterprise.

I asked what she did for a living. She said she was a software engineer working with SOA. I did not think about my plane ride much until I arrived in San Francisco to attend the SOA World Conference & Expo this past Monday and Tuesday. The first day of the conference as I walked into the hotel, guess who I saw? My friend who I met on the Turkish Airlines flight from Istanbul. What a small world, isn't it? Her company was one of the sponsors of the event.

Project Insight 7.0 project management software features graphical portfolio reports, executive dashboards, and project status reports, as well as upgraded timesheet and expense report entry using AJAX or Web 2.0 technology. Project Insight helps project teams collaborate on project schedules, share documents and assets, allocate project resources, and run real-time reports from any location in the world.

BEA's Deputy CTO Theo Beack, who joined the San Jose, CA-based company in May to do 'all the cool stuff,' according to an exclusive interview with SYS-CON at the time, shared with delegates at SOA World Conference & Expo 2007 in San Francisco today his current thinking about Web 2.0, SOA, and Virtualization technologies, and how all three fit within BEA's evolving 'blended' application strategy.

The Enterprise Service Bus provides event-driven and standards-based message services that are fundamental to large and complex enterprise infrastructures. Traditionally the ESB has focused on message delivery between different disparate server-side systems. With the use of modern Web 2.0 techniques we can now extend the ESB all the way to the browser. Messages can be delivered from the server to the Web client in real time, making the Web client an integral part of a service-oriented architecture. In this general session the speakers will introduce you to Enterprise Comet, a real-time message delivery technology that extends the Enterprise Service Bus to your browser.

The rigid deployment architecture hindered the CPs from personalizing their order journeys as well as prevented BT from deploying new or customized services. In this session we will examine how the SOA and Web 2.0 technology-based platform developed in Openreach Portal by wiring up the existing rigid flows and deploying them for execution, through Web and Web service interfaces in real-time and zero down time, gave the power to end users to define their own services and flows.

WaveMaker, formerly known as ActiveGrid, has announced a new corporate brand and product strategy that will address the growing demand for technology that simplifies the assembly of Web applications, while meeting the architectural, security and governance policies of CIOs. WaveMaker will bring to market software enabling the visual assembly and rapid deployment of scalable, enterprise Web 2.0 applications that are both Web Fast and CIO Safe.

HP has announced an enhanced network platform to help telecom operators provide services to millions of customers. HP Service Delivery Platform (SDP) 2.0 enables operators to offer their customers greater access to convergent, multimedia, and 'Web 2.0' services on their mobile devices. The platform also addresses the need for operators to increase revenue from convergent services while simultaneously reducing the cost and risk of creating such services.

Experts at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania have been considering the future of Web apps vs desktop apps. While they predict that any gap between web and desktop software will narrow in the future, they note that one wild card is how well hybrid webtop/desktop applications will match the features of their desktop cousins.

Software AG has unveiled Natural for Ajax, an enhanced version of the Natural programming language for creating AJAX-based, rich Internet applications (RIA). Natural for Ajax enables application development while improving the end-user experience through codeless, drag and drop development of rich, AJAX-based applications and user interfaces.

Nexaweb Technologies has announced its Fall eConference Series created to help IT directors, executives and software developers examine how rich Internet applications (RIAs) enable the agile enterprise and what Forrester dubs the 'Information Workplace.' Technical sessions will cover best practices surrounding large-scale AJAX application development.

Less than 24 hours after the launch of OpenSocial, not only was it running live in Plaxo, but there were already several first-class gadgets from top developers like RockYou and Slide. 'This is just the beginning - there's so much more to do to truly open up the social web,' wrote Plaxo's Joseph Smarr, in his personal blog on web development, tech, and life.

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.

The Web is evolving as an open platform with rich user interface capabilities of desktop clients. This has triggered user-driven management of service consumer ecosystems, expanding the reach of SOA with rich interactive controls and Web 2.0 tools to access the Web content and services. However the usability dimension of these Web 2.0-based service consumer ecosystems is often ignored, leaving doubt about whether present usability testing techniques in Web-based systems are capable enough to guarantee a usable experience in RIA-based service consumer systems.

Imho, Google has a long way to go to build the base of users and developers connected using the new protocol that is the subject of all this chest-thumping. Do they exist in any tangible form? How much of a moving target are they? It's like proclaiming the new owners of A-Rod's contract as the winners of the 2008 World Series. Only in tech, a persistently immature industry, could such an idea be aired seriously (assuming Mike is actually serious). I hope that the Facebook people, many of whom have never been in the middle of a tech PR war, don't overreact. Me, I've been around this block so many times and it's boring. Let's see some software then I'll let you know if this means anything. But Google is keeping people like me far away, which suggests that there may actually be no 'there' there.

Let's consider the pages of a traditional corporate Website. They include an 'about me' page, a contact page, a careers section, and probably a page with news and press releases. The words look good on paper, and, more than likely, a committee gave the final sign-off on the site's content. Visitors frequent these pages because they want to learn about the company's products and services, contact the company by phone to request more information, or find a job.

As Microsoft's recent $240M investment in Facebook gives FB all the capital it needs to further its grand ambitions, some are concerned that one corporation should control so much information about the detailed personal activities and connections among individuals. Even before OpenSocial launched today, one individual had decided to outline an open source software architecture to address these concerns. He has published a technical overview of his ideas for an open source infrastructure for social networking, calling it 'Breaking Open Facebook with Open Source Software.'

What I am going to do in this regular column is feed my habit by highlighting some of the books I am reading, and (mostly) enjoying. (I will only rarely write negative reviews; it's a rare book that I 'do not put down gently but throw across the room with great force' after all.) Geeks like to read - and not only programming books. Most of us read incessantly. Whether it's popular science, sci-fi or fantasy, a good thriller or an occasional popular history book or biography, it's a rare geek who isn't in love with books. And I am no exception, although I have to confess I am rather an extreme case since my love of books and eclectic tastes borders on the 'gentle madness' aka bibliomania.

Keynote Systems has introduced an Internet testing environment for recording and measuring the performance of Web 2.0 applications at all stages of the life cycle. Keynote's Internet Testing Environment (KITE) is a desktop-based console that enables developers and testing professionals, from their own desktop, to test and measure the end-user experience of next-generation Web applications including AJAX-based applications and asynchronously downloaded content.

Standards devised by one tech company whose main purpose is to undermine another tech company, usually don't work. In this case it's Google trying to undermine Facebook. And I don't think it's going to work. What would be exciting and uplifting, a real game-changer -- Internet companies giving users full control of their data.

In a move to bolster its attempt to add a social layer on top of the entire suite of Google services, Google yesterday joined other leading social networking players in introducing a common set of standards to allow software developers to write cross-network programs. According to The New York Times the sites in the OpenSocial alliance 'have a combined 100 million users, more than double the size of Facebook.'

Keynote Systems has announced major upgrades to the company's two flagship Web site performance test and measurement product offerings: Transaction Perspective 8.0 and Application Perspective 5.0. The enhanced versions include the Keynote Internet Testing Environment (KITE), a new desktop-based test and measurement environment that enables developers and testing professionals, from their own desktop, to test and measure the end-user experience of next-generation Web applications that include AJAX and asynchronously downloaded content with point and click ease.

At its analysts' day the other day, Google remained reluctant to forecast how its Google apps will fare and evaded off the question of whether it could get 5%-7% of the SMB segments saying predictions were 'dangerous.' It claimed it's a function of the penetration of Internet and that a lot of companies are still Internet naif. It reckons, however, that its presence in the market has affected pricing.

Often in software I find myself preaching restraint to those who wish to move platforms for no apparent reason than to keep up with the IT fashion industry; however, even harder than the silver-bullet chasers is dealing with organizations where change is required, not only in a company's software stack, but throughout their entire IT department.

'There's definitely a lot of betting going on, and it's not rational.' - Book publisher and conference thrower Tim O'Reilly, who coined the phrase Web 2.0, on the Bubble-style amounts of money going into Internet start-ups as quoted in the New York Times where he worries that the Valley is 'minting too many copycat companies, half-baked business plans and overpriced buy-outs.' The trend in valuing social sites, the latest investment fad, is to count users and ignore any P&Ls.