FatWire Software has acquired Infostoria, a provider of Web 2.0 collaboration and content sharing tools for the enterprise. Infostoria's technology enables single-click wiki creation and blogging, and offers an advanced content integration platform to help organizations manage, find and share content stored in disparate repositories.

Launched in February 2004, Facebook is now worth $15BN - judging from the fact that Microsoft has reportedly just bought itself a modest 1.6% chunk of the company for a staggering $240M. Mark Zuckerberg, a former member of the Harvard Class of 2006, will not be short of change any time soon: as of October 2007, the website had 42 million active members worldwide and expects to pass 60 million users by the end of the year.

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.

WebEffective 6.0 facilitates fast, accurate testing of end users interacting with sites featuring Web 2.0 technologies, including AJAX, Flash and DHTML. DHTML is a combination of technologies gaining in popularity used to create highly dynamic and interactive Web sites in which the user does not actually click on the page to view new content, but simply hovers over it. This is an important and much needed technical and industry advance as until now there have been no user experience tools capable of accurately capturing and measuring the experience of users traversing Web pages that include DHTML content, without actually manually tagging events in order to monitor them. Consequently, WebEffective 6.0 will work with any site, including competitors. The new technology will be extremely useful to marketers interested in understanding the user experience and overall effectiveness of advanced Web 2.0 Web sites.

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.

'We want to provide the best, most engaging discovery experience possible -- whether through the power of our simple 'Stumble' button or by enabling discovery across the Web, with the search engines our users are already familiar with,' said Michael Buhr, general manager of StumbleUpon, as he today released SearchReviews, to enhance the way Internet users discover interesting content. eBay acquired StumbleUpon in May 2007.

What kind of infrastructure should enterprises adopt for mashups? How can an enterprise mashup solution best consume data sources like WSDLs, databases, portals, REST, RSS/ATOM feeds, and legacy systems? How do we orchestrate and coordinate such disparate services inside a mashup? This session will 'talk the talk' about Enterprise Mashups, outlining a working model for mashups in the real-world context of the heterogeneous enterprise.

BEA has released its annual state of the enterprise portal market report, which is available for download. The report reveals that portals remain a top priority for CIOs at large enterprises for the sixth consecutive year. It also compiles survey results from over 540 customers, which indicates that portals will help introduce Web 2.0 capabilities and social computing technologies in the enterprise.

Nexaweb Technologies has announced that InfoWorld Magazine's Test Center has given the Nexaweb Enterprise Web 2.0 Suite a 'very good' rating based on scores of 8.0 and above for each of the five criteria considered critical to the enterprise IT buying decision: capability, developer tools, documentation, performance and value.

Another topic Scoble and I talked about today was Facebook. I said I don't like Facebook, never have, and I finally figured out why. It's another one of those user generated content things, only this time I'm building up an address book that I can look at, but can only do things with it that Facebook lets me do. Why exactly do I need Facebook to get in between me and my address book?

Compuware Corporation has released Compuware Optimal Trace 5.0, the latest version of Compuware Optimal's business requirements management solution. This new version provides an entry into adopting a business requirements management solution and enables organizations to grow into a sophisticated use of 'structured requirements.' It also further strengthens Compuware Optimal's application delivery management solution by offering increased capability to propagate business intent through the life cycle.

The IBM Mashup Starter Kit can combine information from databases, departmental information, personal information or the Web. It rapidly blends information and Web services, such as real-time weather reports or maps, with enterprise content and services, and easily 'mashes' them together to generate fast, flexible and affordable applications for specific business needs.

A new breed of web manager is emerging to link content management more closely to website visitor satisfaction. The new web manager may operate under several professional guises: 'customer advocate,' 'information guru,' or 'metator,' to name just a few. They need to employ a very different set of soft skills than traditional webmastering, and many enterprises are struggling with the personnel challenges of this transition.

And finally Steve gets around to the iPhone. Basically he says that through Web 2.0 and AJAX, you can create applications for the iPhone because the iPhone is running the full, uncut, unaltered version of the same Safari engine that is now running on Mac OS X Leopard, Windows XP, and Windows Vista. This is a huge thing and I can't wait to start exploring some of the possibilities of this. I wonder - you think the iPhone version of Safari will allow the Silverlight plug-in to install? :)

Social networking - not a new idea for the twenty-something generation - but an idea that has finally crossed over into the corporate boardroom thanks to customer demand and open standards technologies built on service-oriented architectures (SOA).

Secure Computing Corporation unveiled the company's new 'SWAT' Initiative for protecting organizations from Web 2.0-related threats carried in Web and messaging protocols. The 'Secure Web 2.0 Anti-Threat' initiative is an intensive effort to provide corporations with informative research, tools, solutions and best practices vital for companies evaluating - or re-evaluating - their approach to Web and messaging security.

Postini's e-mail security and compliance services have been added to Google Apps Premier Edition. Google acquired Postini last month to help companies realize the benefits of hosted applications while also addressing complex information security and compliance requirements.

Everyone in IT understands that there are disasters and then there are disasters. Regardless of the scale of any interruption in operations, disaster recovery plans generally comprise details describing how IT will accomplish the two most important tasks they will face in the event of a disaster: business continuity contingencies and the recovery of lost data.

'The e-mail system is in a complete heap.' Those are the words of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who created a little something called the World Wide Web, in reference to e-mail's shortcomings as a communications tool. His message is that although e-mail is effective for one-on-one dialogue, it has flaws that impede the kind of knowledge gained from true team collaboration. To promote collaboration for your teams and projects in ways that e-mail cannot, the answer lies in the corporate potential of 'Web 2.0' tools.

Experts in mobile applications development, AJAX, and Web standards come together to build a more complete picture of the future of interactive mobile Web applications. W3C and the OpenAjax Alliance have convened a workshop on September 28, at the Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus in Mountain View, CA.

Nexaweb Technologies, provider of the leading standards-based platform for building and deploying Enterprise Web 2.0 (EW2.0) applications, today announced the latest release of its Nexaweb Enterprise Web 2.0 Suite. Nexaweb?s Enterprise Web 2.0 Suite enhanced design and management features, as well as its interoperability with leading governance solutions from Layer 7 and HP Systinet, make it the ideal RIA, composite application and enterprise mash-up development and deployment platform for IT organizations and the heterogeneous and distributed business groups they serve.

The 'upgrade' from Web 1.0 to the new Web 2.0 world has been an evolutionary process, continually driving the Web to be more interactive, useful, and interesting for consumers and the business community. The evolution from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 has been about improvements in the Web 'experience' - from that of simply browsing static content and graphic images that display upon request, to an all-new highly interactive, programmable, and much more useful Web.

Alfred Chuang started out by talking about his core believe that we are on the cusp of fundamental change, with the advent of iPods, Web 2.0, and social networks. He started with a discussion of Mashups, and talked about how most of them are consumer facing. He then said 'The era of innovation in packaged applications is over.' He then called out the key needs he has seen recently from customers.

As more and more Websites incorporate Web 2.0 technologies including Web services, service-oriented architecture, and AJAX to perform more critical online transactions one thing is certain - Web 2.0 technologies increase an organization's security risks.

Accelerators are business specific packages that easily integrate existing portal and address a specific business need. With the delivery of three new accelerators, IBM now offers customers all five of the initial accelerators identified as part of a new strategy announced April 2007 for the portal market. The Dashboard accelerator was announced late April while Workforce Management for HR self-service was made available in July.

David Gootzit talked about the 'Portal of the Future' and mashups are a key actor in the tale he told. David described portals as an 'important' entry point for enterprise mashups. More interestingly, he outlined key areas that must be addressed for mashups to become to a first-class portal citizen (like user profiles, security, metadata and portlets) and guidelines to deploying mashups. And there was more mashup talking to be done. Unfortunately, I had to come home to get ready for AjaxWorld. Which means I am missing Anthony Bradley's session on mashups tomorrow, among others. If anyone has comments on that, I'd love to hear them.

I will be attending the Ajax World Conference next week in Santa Clara. I will also be at the opening reception on Monday and the conference party on Tuesday. Over the weekend Jesse Liberty blogged about this as well 'If you are going to be at AJAXWorld, look for me on Twitter, and let's see if we can set up a meeting or a lunch.' Other faculty members, according to the Ajax World website, who will be at these parties include...

Enterprise Web 2.0 and SOBA development have gained significant momentum among enterprise and public sector IT organizations as delivery platforms for next-generation 'services-based' composite, RIA, 'mashup,' and Net-centric applications. A major consideration in the development of these applications, however, must be governance including the identity of the application user and their location, the provider of these services, how they are secured, and their level of testing.

EasyAsk R10 software includs an easy-to-use, intuitive, AJAX Web-based user interface that provides merchandisers with complete control over the presentation of their products sold on their e-commerce sites. With this new EasyAsk software, merchandisers can optimize product searches based on a wide variety of parameters such as sales popularity and relevance, while automatically adjusting site navigation in real-time based upon search results and exploit up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.

Yahoo has launched Mash as a beta version (by invitation only) this weekend. It's (yet another) social networkig site that appears to be aimed at unseating Facebook, and their biggest differentiator is a wiki-like approach where people can edit each other's profiles. More importantly, you can create a new profile for somebody else and then inite them to 'claim' that profile and make it theirs. Hmmmm, I'm not sure that I really like that idea. Friends writing on my wall in Facebook is one thing, but having them edit my profile?!

Web audience interests are both more diverse and practical than the 'big stories' orientation of the major media outlets. That is the main conclusion of a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism (PEJ),a research organization that specializes in using empirical methods to evaluate and study the performance of the press.

With the release of RichFaces 3.1, JBoss.org has delivered more Web 2.0 development capabilities on Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (EE). This latest update has built-in support for AJAX via Ajax4jsf, an AJAX framework on JavaServer Faces (JSF). Developers have a framework combined with a rich set of open source AJAX-enabled components out-of-the-box, eliminating the need to write any JavaScript for AJAX functionality.

Almost 75% of US Internet users watched videos online in July, up from 71.4% in March, according to comScore Networks. The monthly time spent watching videos went up to an average of 181 minutes per viewer in July from 145 minutes per viewer in March.

One of the more annoying aspects of Web 2.0, etc., is the injection of neologisms, protologisms, or just plan made up words. In fact, I do not think that I have heard a talk from my friends Jay Simons or David Meyer in the last year that has not included a protologism. (I like the word protologism better, since it indicates something not quite finished, completed, or even valid). This include words like 'folksonomy'.

Kaazing and Terracotta announced a strategic alliance to deliver the software industry's most scalable and advanced real-time Web 2.0 technology for financial systems, online gaming, online sports and news broadcasting applications. The seamless integration between Kaazing's real-time Rich Internet Application (RIA) solution, Enterprise Comet, and Terracotta's Network Attached Memory software enables Kaazing customers to create and deploy scalable mission-critical real-time Web 2.0 solutions, such as trading system clients, online betting applications, performance monitoring, RFID/GPS tracking systems, and sports and news broadcasting applications. Customers can also reduce time-to-market, increase accessibility to their real-time offerings, and improve service levels to their customers.

Social networking sites have taken off over the last few years, and for a long time there seemed to be a clear divide: Doostang, Ecademy, LinkedIn, and Xing for business networking vs. Facebook, Friendster, and MySpace for kids (be it high-school or college). Plus every network had their own particular and sometimes even unique focus (e.g. Musicians on MySpace, Harvard and MIT grads on Doostang, and lots of Europeans on Xing).

So, for those of you who were on the fence about building iPhone applications using Web 2.0 technologies, think about this: Your potential list of application users is about to grow beyond users of the iPhone, and will include a crapload of people buying new iPods. If you think about the ubiquitous nature of WiFi (well, semi-ubiquitous), you're going to have people with iPod Touches hitting your application from coffee shops, airports, offices, hotel lobbies, hotel rooms, conference and convention centers, and a lot of restaurants.

In a recent presentation I attended, the speaker warmed up with a couple of bulleted lists that outlined the agenda of the session before moving onto his third slide that was clearly many days, work of stitching together powerpoint glyphs and figures in a sort of three dimensional loop that attempted to show the progression of software APIs around the evolution of networked computing.

Capitalizing on the growth in SaaS solutions, Capgemini has announced services that support the adoption of Google Apps Premier Edition by large-scale enterprises. Partnering with Google enables Capgemini extends its portfolio of desktop solutions, enabling it to support more client employees, regardless of their locations, platforms and roles.

We recommend using TestMaker's scripting support to test AJAX applications. In TestMaker transform the TestGen4Web recorded file into a Jython script (use the Tools menu -> Import TestGen4Web) and change it to emit the HTTP calls to the target host that the JavaScript in your app is doing. Although you may need to learn Jython or one of the other support languages, you will not have to get a PHD degree. We are investigating a way to use Selenium and HTMLUnit and Rhino to record a test, transform it into a TestMaker test agent script, and then run it in the TestMaker environment.