“A global earthquake mashup with a difference.” Reto has this to say: “..I’ve drawn my influence from the Natural History Museum’s real-time earthquake exhibit, so as well as showing the usual list of earthquake epicentres, I’ve overlaid the damage radius and the ‘felt’ radius. The result is a display of concentric circles around the world showing the relative power and reach of earthquakes as they happen. To get better coverage I’ve also integrated different earthquake feeds from the official surveyors in the US, Europe, and Australia.” Reto notes that he made use of the Google Mashup Editor to create this mashup.

Citing the recent McKinsey Web 2.0 in business survey in which it was discovered that 21% of organizations globally are using or planning to use mashups, Hinchcliffe published the list this week in his popular Enterprise Web 2.0 blog.

Although he didn’t include Google Mashup Editor (GME), his seventeen picks included the WSO2 Mashup Server released just last month and there was praise from Hinchcliffe for Yahoo!’s data mashup tool, Yahoo! Pipes.

IBM’s QEDWiki received his highest accolade though. He called it “one of the most impressive mashup platforms presently available and…the de facto poster child for how the end-user development model of enterprise mashups might look.”

Read the fully annotated list here. [Source: SocialComputingMagazine]

The three key technology themes identified by Gartner, and the corresponding technologies for enterprises to examine closely within them, are:

1. Web 2.0

Web 2.0 represents a broad collection of recent trends in Internet technologies and business models. Particular focus has been given to user-created content, lightweight technology, service-based access and shared revenue models. Technologies rated by Gartner as having transformational, high or moderate impact include:

Social Network Analysis (SNA) is rated as high impact (definition: enables new ways of performing vertical applications that will result in significantly increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise) and capable of reaching maturity in less than two years. SNA is the use of information and knowledge from many people and their personal networks. It involves collecting massive amounts of data from multiple sources, analyzing the data to identify relationships and mining it for new information. Gartner said that SNA can successfully impact a business by being used to identify target markets, create successful project teams and serendipitously identify unvoiced conclusions.

Ajax is also rated as high impact and capable of reaching maturity in less than two years. Ajax is a collection of techniques that Web developers use to deliver an enhanced, more-responsive user experience in the confines of a modern browser (for example, recent version of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari or Opera). A narrow-scope use of Ajax can have a limited impact in terms of making a difficult-to-use Web application somewhat less difficult. However, Gartner said, even this limited impact is worth it, and users will appreciate incremental improvements in the usability of applications. High levels of impact and business value can only be achieved when the development process encompasses innovations in usability and reliance on complementary server-side processing (as is done in Google Maps).

Collective intelligence, rated as transformational (definition: enables new ways of doing business across industries that will result in major shifts in industry dynamics) is expected to reach mainstream adoption in five to ten years. Collective intelligence is an approach to producing intellectual content (such as code, documents, indexing and decisions) that results from individuals working together with no centralized authority. This is seen as a more cost-efficient way of producing content, metadata, software and certain services.

Mashup is rated as moderate on the Hype Cycle (definition: provides incremental improvements to established processes that will result in increased revenue or cost savings for an enterprise), but is expected to hit mainstream adoption in less than two years. A “mashup” is a lightweight tactical integration of multi-sourced applications or content into a single offering. Because mashups leverage data and services from public Web sites and Web applications, they’re lightweight in implementation and built with a minimal amount of code. Their primary business benefit is that they can quickly meet tactical needs with reduced development costs and improved user satisfaction. Gartner warns that because they combine data and logic from multiple sources, they’re vulnerable to failures in any one of those sources.

2. Real World Web

Increasingly, real-world objects will not only contain local processing capabilities—due to the falling size and cost of microprocessors—but they will also be able to interact with their surroundings through sensing and networking capabilities. The emergence of this Real World Web will bring the power of the Web, which today is perceived as a “separate” virtual place, to the user’s point of need of information or transaction. Technologies rated as having particularly high impact include:

Location-aware technologies should hit maturity in less than two years. Location-aware technology is the use of GPS (global positioning system), assisted GPS (A-GPS), Enhanced Observed Time Difference (EOTD), enhanced GPS (E-GPS), and other technologies in the cellular network and handset to locate a mobile user. Users should evaluate the potential benefits to their business processes of location-enabled products such as personal navigation devices (for example, TomTom or Garmin) or Bluetooth-enabled GPS receivers, as well as WLAN location equipment that may help automate complex processes, such as logistics and maintenance. Whereas the market sees consolidation around a reduced number of high-accuracy technologies, the location service ecosystem will benefit from a number of standardized application interfaces to deploy location services and applications for a wide range of wireless devices.

Location-aware applications will hit mainsteam adoption in the next two to five years. An increasing number of organizations have deployed location-aware mobile business applications, mostly based on GPS-enabled devices, to support queue business processes and activities, such as field force management, fleet management, logistics and good transportation. The market is in an early adoption phase, and Europe is slightly ahead of the United States, due to the higher maturity of mobile networks, their availability and standardization.

Sensor Mesh Networks are ad hoc networks formed by dynamic meshes of peer nodes, each of which includes simple networking, computing and sensing capabilities. Some implementations offer low-power operation and multi-year battery life. Technologically aggressive organizations looking for low-cost sensing and robust self-organizing networks with small data transmission volumes should explore sensor networking. The market is still immature and fragmented, and there are few standards, so suppliers will evolve and equipment could become obsolete relatively rapidly. Therefore, this area should be seen as a tactical investment, as mainstream adoption is not expected for more than ten years.

3. Applications Architecture

The software infrastructure that provides the foundation for modern business applications continues to mirror business requirements more directly. The modularity and agility offered by service oriented architecture at the technology level and business process management at the business level will continue to evolve through high impact shifts such as model-driven and event-driven architectures, and corporate semantic Web. Technologies rated as having particularly high impact include:

Event-driven Architecture (EDA) is an architectural style for distributed applications, in which certain discrete functions are packaged into modular, encapsulated, shareable components, some of which are triggered by the arrival of one or more event objects. Event objects may be generated directly by an application, or they may be generated by an adapter or agent that operates non-invasively (for example, by examining message headers and message contents).EDA has an impact on every industry. Although mainstream adoption of all forms of EDA is still five to ten years away, complex-event processing EDA is now being used in financial trading, energy trading, supply chain, fraud detection, homeland security, telecommunications, customer contact center management, logistics and sensor networks, such as those based on RFID.

Model-driven Architecture is a registered trademark of the Object Management Group (OMG). It describes OMG’s proposed approach to separating business-level functionality from the technical nuances of its implementation The premise behind OMG’s Model-Driven Architecture and the broader family of model-driven approaches (MDAs) is to enable business-level functionality to be modeled by standards, such as Unified Modeling Language (UML) in OMG’s case; allow the models to exist independently of platform-induced constraints and requirements; and then instantiate those models into specific runtime implementations, based on the target platform of choice. MDAs reinforce the focus on business first and technology second. The concepts focus attention on modeling the business: business rules, business roles, business interactions and so on. The instantiation of these business models in specific software applications or components flows from the business model. By reinforcing the business-level focus and coupling MDAs with SOA concepts, you end up with a system that is inherently more flexible and adaptable.

Corporate Semantic Web applies semantic Web technologies, aka semantic markup languages (for example, Resource Description Framework, Web Ontology Language and topic maps), to corporate Web content. Although mainstream adoption is still five to ten years away, many corporate IT areas are starting to engage in semantic Web technologies. Early adopters are in the areas of enterprise information integration, content management, life sciences and government. Corporate Semantic Web will reduce costs and improve the quality of content management, information access, system interoperability, database integration and data quality.

“The emerging technologies hype cycle covers the entire IT spectrum but we aim to highlight technologies that are worth adopting early because of their potentially high business impact,” said Jackie Fenn, Gartner Fellow and inventor of the first hype cycle. One of the features highlighted in the 2006 Hype Cycle is the growing consumerisation of IT. “Many of the Web 2.0 phenomenon have already reshaped the Web in the consumer world”, said Ms Fenn. “Companies need to establish how to incorporate consumer technologies in a secure and effective manner for employee productivity, and also how to transform them into business value for the enterprise”.

The benefit of a particular technology varies significantly across industries, so planners must determine which opportunities relate most closely to their organisational requirements. To make this easier, a new feature in Gartner’s 2006 hype cycle is a ‘priority matrix’ which clarifies a technology’s potential impact - from transformational to low – and the number of years it will take before it reaches mainstream adoption. “The pairing of each Hype Cycle with a Priority Matrix will help organisations to better determine the importance and timing of potential investments based on benefit rather than just hype,” said Ms Fenn.

2006 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies

Note to editors: More information on each of the technologies identified in the emerging technologies hype cycle and on the priority matrix can be obtained from Gartner PR.

Despite the changes in specific technologies over the years, the hype cycle’s underlying message remains the same: Don’t invest in a technology just because it is being hyped, and don’t ignore a technology just because it is not living up to early expectations.

“Be selectively aggressive — identify which technologies could benefit your business, and evaluate them earlier in the Hype Cycle”, said Ms. Fenn. “For technologies that will have a lower impact on your business, let others learn the difficult lessons, and adopt the technologies when they are more mature.”

http://code.google.com/gme/gettingstarted.html

Google’s Mashup Editor is the latest online development platform to appear. Like Microsoft’s Popfly and Yahoo!’s Pipes before it, it’s a tool for building hosted JavaScript applications. Unlike Popfly and Pipes, however, it’s much more of a barebones solution, leaving the graphical front-ends firmly at the door.

Inspired by Tristan Louis’s research into the value of each link to Weblogs Inc, Dan Carlon’s have created this little applet using Technorati’s API which computes and displays your blog’s worth using the same link to dollar ratio as the AOL-Weblogs Inc deal.

It is very good link you must visit atleast once.

here is the link for that:

http://www.business-opportunities.biz/projects/how-much-is-your-blog-worth/

I have been writing about a number of mashup tools on my blog, and I encourage you to take a look. Here is my list of tutorials so far:

Ajax + JSON + Google Maps = Hello World Mashup

Intended for newbies to mashups starting with minimal web programming skills. This example shows how easy it is to build a Google Maps mashup using the following technologies: HTML, JSON, Javascript, Ajax, and the Google Maps API.

Building a Data Driven Mashup using Microsoft Popfly

This tutorial shows how to build a Microsoft Popfly mashup using a data feed that we build. This mashup uses: Popfly, JSON and Javascript technologies. Note that Popfly requires you to install the Microsoft Silverlight plugin into your browser. You will be prompted to do so before viewing the mashup.

BEA WebLogic + Microsoft Popfly = Enterprise Mashups

This tutorial integrates our previous work with Microsoft Popfly to include an enterprise data service provided by BEA WebLogic Portal. This shows the promise of enterprise mashups within Popfly.

Schmapplets: Google Maps Construction Tool for the Non-Technical User

Schmapplets is a tool that allows a non-techie to build a Google Maps based mashup. If you want to get Mom going on creating mashups, Schmapplets is the tool to use. Mom still won’t have any idea about what you do for your job, but that’s a much bigger problem.

BEA WebLogic Portal + Swivel.com + Excel = Enterprise Data Mashup

In this blog entry I explore an approach that allows spreadsheet data to be managed by IT, and then visually mashed up with other data sets. This solution combines the Content Management capabilities of WebLogic Portal with the data mashup features of Swivel.com.

Enjoy! [Source: MashupCamp]

Click here: Create a Poply Mashup Guide

* More of everything.
* Asymmetric data formats
* Scripting based
* Hidden URLs and code

This first episode is brought to you by the letter “M”.

More of Everything

So what’s that mean, “more of everything”? Well, Web 2.0, whether we’re talking about applications (blogs, wikis, forums, video) or the technologies that enable the applications (AJAX, XML, RSS, RDF, etc…), simply contains more of everything than its legacy predecessors.

There are more:

* connections
* data formats
* components
* scripts

Hence, there are more attack vectors and more vulnerabilities, simply because you’re combining multiple languages, technologies, and paradigms into a single, behemoth application.

You’ll also notice that there are more scripts on the server side. That’s because whether we’re talking about AJAX toolkits or mashups using syndication protocols (RSS, RDF, etc…), the paradigm encourages one script per component. This makes it easier to reuse a common component across multiple applications, but introduces issues of code security and management that need to be addressed.

And finally, there are simply more connections. Not just initially, when the application is loaded, but on an ongoing basis as components perform actions such as update automatically, respond to user actions, and prefetch data.

The Risks

The risks inherent in “more” of everything are fairly recognizable as long-standing, traditional Web-based application risks.

More Connections.

The increase in connections, and length of those connections, can inadvertently consume more resources than necessary and cause an outage, resulting in a denial of service to other users. Just as easily as this can occur inadvertently, of course, it could be accomplished with more malicious intent. Connections made via the XMLHTTPRequest object do not necessarily carry the “referrer” header, which makes the use of this object to load or pre-fetch data even more dangerous, as it may be impossible (by default) to know whether the request is coming from a legitimate site, user, or application.

More Scripts.

There are more server-side scripts (applications) to secure, as well as the additional burden of dealing with script (usually Javascript) on the client. Every line of code written is another opportunity for a vulnerability to be introduced. Every line of code written needs to be secured, which adds additional burdens on the server executing the code.

This is especially problematic with toolkits, such as Dojo and Script.aculo.us, because these toolkits become “black boxes” for communication. Developers aren’t necessarily aware of what the actual scripts - loaded onto the client - are doing, how they work, or what measures their developers took to secure the toolkit. There’s almost no way for a user of the toolkit to know whether the version s/he downloaded and is using has been compromised.

More components. There are more components in a Web 2.0 application, in the developer-oriented view of component as a self-contained object that combines presentation and application logic. Each component not only generally corresponds to a script on the server, but also contains code (Javascript, VBScript, ActionScript) on the client that validates, formats, parses, and otherwise manipulates user input. This script may also trigger other events, which in turn executes other script logic on the client and usually also results in another call to a another script on the server.

The additonal components and their application logic represent risk because they may be black-boxes (as with toolkits), they may be third-party constructed (and sometimes even hosted), and the scripting languages on the client are human readable, potentially offering attackers information about internal schemas, formats, and processes that can be exploited.

More data formats.

The potential to mix and max data formats adds additional complexity to the task of securing Web 2.0 applications. The plethora of data formats primarily causes issues because it increases the number of potential attacks to which your application is vulnerable. It can also cause issues for web application vulnerability scanners that cannot adapt to multiple data formats in a single request (e.g. XML Islands). [Source: DevCentral]

Yet too often, enterprise apps remain mired in the 20th century. If IT doesn’t adapt, users will either route around it, with possible security and compliance implications, or the organization will miss out on newer, more efficient ways of collaborating.

But some vendors are going further, saying Web 2.0 is about more than just employee satisfaction and better communication. Startups including JackBe, Coghead and LongJump see employees as a rich source of IT innovation, and in response have aimed their mashup platforms at regular people, not developers. They’ve now been joined by giants IBM and BEA Systems, both of which used the show to demonstrate tools designed for line-of-business staff.

Collectively known as Info 2.0, Big Blue’s mashup suite is due to enter free beta next month, with general availability in about six months. IBM demonstrated two main components at the show: The Info 2.0 development platform itself, and a Mashup Hub, which is aimed at centralizing management of mashups and mashable components—usually RSS feeds and Ajax widgets, either developed in-house or found on the Internet.

The idea is that employees create applications using the Hub’s drag-and-drop interface, while IT catalogs, manages and secures the apps in the Hub. According to IBM, this setup is intended to make the relationship between IT and staff less adversarial: Individual users and business units do what they want with their own data, while IT can still assure security and regulatory compliance.

Busy BEA

BEA used the show to demonstrate its AquaLogic Pages and AquaLogic Ensemble mashup products, which were announced in March and are due to ship next month. It acquired both in 2006, along with a third component, the AquaLogic Pathways social bookmarking engine. (IBM also entered the social-bookmarking market this week with the launch of Lotus Connections.) AquaLogic Pages is the visual development environment aimed at employees, while the Pathways management system for IT is roughly equivalent to IBM’s Hub.

However, the two vendors aren’t pushing exactly the same vision: BEA’s Pathways also includes some tools for developers, aimed at the creation of widgets that employees can then use in mashups. For its part, IBM is leaving actual widget development to others, saying that many of its customers use open-source tools, especially Dojo. And unlike BEA’s offering, Info 2.0 does include some service-enablement features, intended to expose text or spreadsheet files as RSS services that can be included as mashups.

This tack is similar to strategies cited by startups Kapow Technologies, Denodo Technologies and Serendipity Technologies WorkLight, all of which stress that simple development tools are only half the enterprise mashup story. Most organizations have a huge amount of valuable data locked up in files stored on employees’ hard drives, which at present are not even accessible on the corporate intranet, never mind as mashups.

The big question for IT: Will users want to develop their own mashup applications? The majority probably won’t, so these tools clearly aren’t for everyone. However, some will, and may even be doing so already using outside service providers or public Web sites. Enterprise mashup tools can both help prevent data leaks and maintain IT’s relevance—good news for both IT shops and the vendors that sell to them. [Source: Networkcomputing]

RSS ENABLEMENT

Most intranets are fairly Spartan affairs, at least compared with the sum total of an organization’s knowledge. There’s an untapped wealth of data contained within spreadsheets and text files, and it’s that information that service-enablement vendors aim to expose. The concept is similar to service enablement for SOA, but hugely simplified so that no development skills are necessary. Instead of converting APIs to SOAP or other Web services, these apps convert files or Web pages to RSS feeds. Kapow Technologies, Serendipity Technologies WorkLight and Denodo Technologies all showed off capabilities in this area, while IBM demonstrated its Info 2.0 product, which will combine with an enterprise mashup platform. Denodo also offers a mashup platform and a macro recorder that can retrieve information from Web sites, while Kapow displayed an automated screen-scraping function, which converts any Web site (on the Internet or an intranet) into an RSS feed.

Once RSS feeds have been enabled, enterprises need to find something to do with them. On the Internet, an RSS feed may be consumed by a Web browser, a standalone reader or a portal. The same options can work in an intranet, but the large number of feeds created from files or Web pages will quickly make this unwieldy. One option is to mash feeds up into new applications, using development platforms aimed at end users from JackBe, Denodo, IBM or BEA Systems. Another route is RSS management apps from Attensa, n Software RSSBus or NewsGator Technologies.

OFFICE SUITES

In Web 1.0, every startup wanted to be the next Microsoft. In Web 2.0, they all want to be the next Google. At Enterprise 2.0, it seems that many aim to compete with both Google and Microsoft, offering online office suites that they hope can combine the best of both worlds: The collaboration capabilities of a Web-based suite combined with the control over your own data of locally installed software.

The first online office suite (not counting Corel’s proof-of-concept a decade ago) was from ThinkFree Corp., and the company used the show to demonstrate its new offline edition. Running under Java and so cross-platform, ThinkFree automatically synchronizes files with the online edition. It’s also about to unveil support for Microsoft’s new Office 2007 file formats, which have been published as a standard but are notoriously difficult to implement. Competitor AdventNet Zoho showcased its applications, which go beyond the usual word processor, spreadsheet and presentation to include CRM and wiki functionality.

Octopz demonstrated a slightly different spin on document collaboration. Rather than edit files directly, its offering enables users to mark them up using separate metadata that can travel along with voice, video and IM sessions. Because it has only to read files, not write to them, Octopz can support more than 100 different types, including CAD and video formats in addition to standard Office documents.

BLOGS AND WIKIS

Blogs have quickly overtaken Usenet and public e-mail lists as the preferred venue for Internet discussion, while their participatory features help them rival the Web sites of offline media. However, blogs haven’t taken off within the enterprise—most employees have neither the time nor the inclination to write blog entries. For internal use, most enterprises will find the collaborative authoring, organization and versioning capabilities of wikis more useful than the personal publishing of blogs, so the space has attracted a large number of vendors. Atlassian Software Systems, Socialtext, CustomerVision, Near-Time and Mindquarry all showed off enterprise wiki systems, with most also offering blogs or similar capabilities. Mindquarry in particular aims to make blogs more accessible by fusing them with e-mail and IM, which can be used to read and write comments.

TAGGING AND SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

Enterprise search is a hard nut to crack, in part because few hyperlinks show relationships among documents. Several vendors see social bookmarking as the solution: As employees tag documents or share bookmarks, a map of documents’ relevance to particular subjects can be built up. If the people who authored documents or applied tags are also tracked, the system can keep tabs on employee expertise, sorting into groups those who know a lot about a particular topic. The problem, of course, is motivating employees to tag documents.

Connectbeam is a pioneer in this space, with a system that works with several popular enterprise search engines, including those from Google, IBM and Yahoo. BEA also sees potential, using the show to demonstrate its Pathways product, due to launch next month.

WEB 2.0 APPLIANCES

In the true mashup spirit, some vendors are offering all-in-one suites that combine several features. Blogtronix has gone further, packaging a combination of blog, wiki and social bookmarking software that can be purchased as a hardware appliance, in addition to software and hosted service options. Encouraged by a Gartner report that said 61 percent of enterprises would rather buy Enterprise 2.0 technologies as a single suite from a well-known vendor, Intel Corp. has launched Suite Two. Essentially a bundle of software from six other vendors (Six Apart, Socialtext, NewsGator, SimpleFeed, SpikeSource and Visible Path Corp.), Suite Two is available with or without an Intel server to run it on. [Source: Networkcomputing]

Much of this is due to the fact that youngsters filtering into the workplace expect to have access to these tools. This InformationWeek story quotes IDC numbers showing that 45 percent of companies have workers that blog, 43 percent have really simple syndication (RSS) users and 35 percent use wikis. The clear signal is that these folks will use the tools, either with or without the blessing of the IT department. Simply outlawing them won’t work. It also will lead to security problems. A taste of the potential for trouble can be seen by the proliferation of rouge access points in companies aren’t proactive in wireless adoption.

This very nicely done eWeek story, based at a panel at the conference, suggests how deeply social networking tools have permeated two big players, Cisco and Motorola. The latter has 4,400 blogs and 4,200 wikis, an executive says. An interesting observation by a Motorola executive is that the gating factor in the use of these tools is seniority, not age. The higher up the employee — not the older he or she is — the less likely they are to use Web 2.0 applications.

Cisco, of course, is a networking company. Though that is a bit of a semantic trick — Cisco’s networking involves routers and servers, not social networking tools — there is a connection. The company recently bought WebEx and is moving more fully into the unified communications sector, which is closely related to Web 2.0.

The depth of the use of Web 2.0 — both for internal communications and to reach outsiders — is a theme in this TechWeb round table between representatives from the TowerGroup, The Hartford and Nexaweb. Insurance, it is fair to point out, is not the most cutting-edge industry.

Another announcement was made by IBM, which said its Lotus Quickr is available. The suite includes Big Blue’s initial available wiki, a shared content library, blogs and other social networking tools.

The announcements of corporate Web 2.0 products won’t stop, either. This InfoWorld story says that next month BEA Systems will ship three Web 2.0 products. AquaLogic Pages is a mashup builder, AquaLogic Ensemble is aimed at mashup developers and AquaLogic Pathways is a social bookmarking and tagging tool aimed at business users. [Source: ITBusinessEdge]

McAfee, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, coined the term “Enterprise 2.0” which he defines as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.” In his definition, ‘emergent’ means that the technology offers “mechanisms to let the patterns and structure inherent in people’s interactions become visible over time.”

More practically, Enterprise 2.0 is about the deployment of blogs, wikis, social networks, and more freeform, egalitarian collaborative technologies that tap into the collective mind within enterprises. McAfee further identified search, links, authoring, tags, extensions and signals as characteristics of Enterprise 2.0 technologies.

During the debate McAfee acknowledged that Enteprise 2.0 is at an early stage, with few proof points to substantiate his theory at this juncture. Davenport, a professor at Babson College and the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management, contended that Enterprise 2.0 transforming proof points will remain elusive–it won’t overthrow the traditional hierarchies and power structures that have governed corporate culture for centuries.

He has expressed that view in his blog, “Most of the barriers that prevent knowledge from flowing freely in organizations – power differentials, lack of trust, missing incentives, unsupportive cultures, and the general busyness of employees today – won’t be addressed or substantially changed by technology alone.”

McAfee agreed the transforming culture is a significant challenge, and said that enlightened leadership would pave the way to Enterprise 2.0 deployments. He said that Enterprise 2.0 technologies would continue to seep into companies, and that the new generation brought up on digital technologies coming into the workforce, could be an accelerator to acceptance of the technologies and culture changes. McAfee suggests that Enterprise 2.0 provide managers with the opportunity to foster lateralism, egalitarianism, crowd sourcing, innovative ideas and collective intelligence in a corporate setting.

Davenport countered that Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t offer much new and it’s not revolutionary. Tags, search, knowledge management, email and links have been around for years, and haven’t done much to democratize corporate cultures, he said.

That’s like saying the Internet is not new. Yes, it’s been around since 1969, but in the last decade the Internet has revolutionized communications globally. That’s new. Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t have to be completely new to have a significant impact on corporate culture, productivity and competitiveness. Imagine Facebook in a business context, mashing up people and information in ways that help companies run faster, smarter and more efficiently.

In the end, and as a user of Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 technologies and services, I have to side with McAfee’s sense, as opposed to empirical evidence, that Enterprise 2.0 will eventually become mainstream. [Source: ZDNet]

The Connected Services Sandbox was created to help telecommunications service providers rapidly develop, test and commercialize a range of innovative new services,” said Michael O’Hara, general manager for the Communications Sector at Microsoft. “By taking an operator’s core network assets and combining them with technologies and applications from the Web 2.0 world, the Sandbox brings operators closer to Telco 2.0. Operators have an opportunity to deliver hundreds, if not thousands, of new revenue-generating services to their customers in this new telecom order, and the Connected Services Sandbox is key in accelerating this process.

The Google AJAX Search API is designed to allow applications to easily embed Google Search into their applications. The Google AJAX Feed API is our newest AJAX API. It is designed to deliver high fidelity RSS and Atom feeds directly to your site. This talk will walk you through the feature set of these APIs, will give you a peek under the hood, and will show you how our customers are currently putting these APIs to use on their sites. [Source: Besttechvideos]

The competition runs up to Sept 12th and the Skype developer’s conference in Prague. The one requirement seems to be that there should be at least some use of the Skype API.

Judges will be from across Skype, eBay and Paypal, plus external judges. The winner will be chosen and announced on Sep 12th in Prague based on the following criteria: innovation, usefulness, cool factor, usability and a dash of weirdness.

Lat49 is currently in Beta and developers are encouraged to contact the company to help with the initial testing.
More on this can be found at http://www.lat49.com

David Cann has whipped up a demo page that shows you what this web experience might look like on the iPhone. Using the Digg API, David wrote this Digg page that lets you skim Digg’s categories. He has made the source code available, so you can dive in for yourself. Oh, and I tested it in Safari 3, and it works so I assume it’ll work on your iPhone. [Source: tuaw]

According to industry analysts, mashups are one of the most promising trends in IT today, with the potential to enable a new wave of productivity gains by knowledge workers, whose application needs are largely unaddressed today with current IT capabilities. As proof, Kapow Technologies has completed approximately 200 enterprise mashups projects over the past three years, the majority of which involve collecting unstructured web-based content programmatically and automating the flow of that data into other web applications, portals, and databases.

“Now that mainstream companies are realizing advantages of the mashup paradigm, they are looking for more powerful – and more simple – ways to provide expanded data resources to knowledge workers,” said Stefan Andreasen, founder and CTO of Kapow Technologies. “Consequently, we have extended the capabilities of the Kapow Mashup Server family into the areas of content migration and Web 2.0 applications, providing lightweight feeds and service interfaces to previously unavailable data sources.”

New Kapow Mashup Server Editions

All enterprise mashups have one thing in common: they require programmatic access to the underlying data and services that comprise the building blocks of the mashup. While there are a lot of different companies that focus on providing the visual composition tools for mashup components, Kapow Technologies is one of the few that enables access to the underlying data sources and services to be mashed up. New editions of the Kapow Mashup Server family are:

* Web 2.0 Edition – This new offering greatly increases Kapow Technologies’ ability to develop data-centric mashups, giving IT the capability to build a new class of quick-to-assemble applications based on lightweight RSS feeds and REST services. Web 2.0 Edition is optimized for easy and quick creation of mashable components from just about any web resource, making it possible to reuse web data or business logic from inside the company or the public web. Once the feeds have been generated, they can be published as lightweight feeds or services, typically used by mashup builders to develop quick-to-assemble ad hoc applications that combine web content from different sources into a new application. Another key benefit of the Web 2.0 Edition is that IT organizations can cost-effectively address the ‘long tail’ of their application backlog, using mashups as a means to rapidly deploy IT solutions to the edge of the enterprise.

* Content Migration Edition – This edition eliminates the traditional, expensive, cut-and-paste approach to migration of content between or into enterprise content management (ECM) systems, automating the process and significantly reducing the need for human intervention. Using the Kapow Mashup Server, source content can be quickly and easily collected and converted to the appropriate format that maps to the relevant target schema or template, all in an automated fashion. This unique approach allows any web-based content to be rapidly incorporated into a content management data store, greatly extending the reach and interoperability of an ECM solution.

Existing offerings of the Kapow Mashup Server family include the Data Collection Edition, which enables API-based access to a wide variety of structured and unstructured data, from a wide variety of sources, both in the web tier and the filesystem. Kapow Technologies’ fourth offering is the Portal Content Edition, which enables cost-effective delivery of web based content and functionality into portal servers. [Source: ebizq]

“We have been trying to find a solution to expand the capabilities of the iPhone by letting developers write applications for it, and yet keep the iPhone reliable and secure,” Jobs told delegates.

Instead of allowing developers to install applications directly onto the phone, Apple has opted for the more controlled environment of the Safari browser.

“[The Safari engine] gives us tremendous capability, more than there has ever been in a mobile device. You can write amazing web 2.0 and Ajax applications that look exactly, and behave exactly, like applications on the iPhone,” said Jobs.

Applications will still be able to use the phone’s functionalities and place phone calls, said Jobs.

Working through the browser also allows developers to prepare applications today and have them available when the iPhone starts shipping on 29 June. No special sofware development kit is required.

The ability for developers to write software for the phone has been the subject of speculation ever since Apple first unveiled the device in January.

Because the iPhone runs a special version of Apple’s OS X operating system, developers and potential users expressed interest in creating applications similar to the software that they can write for Mac computers today.

But although third-party applications are likely to increase the appeal of the device, they are also a potential liability if they crash the phone or degrade the user experience.

Using the browser as a controlled environment to deliver third-party applications is a tested method. Research in Motion, for example, uses a browser to isolate software from critical components of the phone on its enterprise email platform.

“They output the information into the browser engine,” said Ken Dulaney, vice president for mobile and wireless with analyst firm Gartner. “That eliminates the management problems that you might have otherwise.”

Gerry Purdy, a principal analyst with Mobiletrax, has been briefed by Apple on the company’s plans with the iPhone.

“They want developers to work through Apple rather than have a completely open platform over the first few quarters,” Purdy told vnunet.com.

“Then they plan to expand the application development capability. It makes sense to them and the industry that they want to protect the user experience.”

If Apple will ever allow third-party developers to create software directly on the device, the company is most likely to subject software to a certification programme. That allows Apple to control the quality of the software, suggested Purdy. [Source: VNUNet]

Among the new APIs that eBay is rolling out is one that developers have been asking about for years, a bidding API.

“In the past developers have used scraping tools to do things with bidding, which eBay has not encouraged,” Max Mancini, senior director of eBay’s disruptive innovation team, told internetnews.com. “And now people can do bidding-type applications with these new APIs.”

The eBay Bidding API will enable developers to integrate bidding functionality into third-party applications and sites; users won’t be tied strictly to eBay.com to bid anymore.

A new eBay Client Alert API is also being developed, which promises users near real-time alerts from eBay about activity.

Not only is eBay opening up more of its platform, it’s also attempting to make access to its platform faster, too. EBay said the new Shopping Web Services APIs are 16 times faster than older APIs. The Shopping Web Services are structured around eBay search.

“These APIs support token-less calls. This means they’re structured to return only data specifically required for the call,” Mancini explained. “In the past, big calls would return lots and lots of XML, when the developer may have only required two or three pieces of it.

“So we’ve trimmed down the result set so people get what they are most likely after based on feedback from developers about what they’re most often requiring.”

Scale is also on the table for eBay’s revised APIs. EBay had limited developers to only 10,000 API calls per month. Now eBay has upped the number to 150,000 a month, and it won’t cost developers a dime. Since 2005 eBay has offered access to its APIs for free.

Most eBay users access eBay through their Web browser, though that is a paradigm that expanded APIs and a new beta program may one day change.

Project San Dimas is an eBay desktop application built on Adobe’s Apollo platform now called AIR. Mancini explained that San Dimas brings the eBay.com marketplace from the Web to users’ desktops. AJAX, Flash, and other technologies become more accessible with San Dimas, allowing the members of the eBay Developers Program to easily bring full-blown applications and not just widgets to user desktop.

San Dimas is currently in an invitation-only beta, though Mancini noted that as eBay gets more feedback, it’ll expand the beta so more people can participate. [Source: Internetnews]

Here is one example:

Speaker Bio: Brandon is the Product Manager for the Google Maps API and KML. While at Google, he has worked to grow the Google Maps and Google Earth development communities. Prior to Google, Brandon worked as an Engineer and Development Manager at Symantec. He holds an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University. As an Undergraduate, he played on the NCAA champion Stanford tennis team and earned a BA in Economics.

As with any other web2.0 technologies, mashups are gaining attention in enterprise environments. Organizations which are still struggling to get on to the web2.0 bandwagon are hoping to kill two birds with one stone - i.e. adopt web2.0 technologies and club them together into a mashup.

In a desparate attempt to win the mash-up race, IT divisions are providing band-aid (architectural) approaches to combine the various technologies to facilitate the mashup. The outcome is often disparate systems unable to ‘talk’ to each other - a Mess-up. [Source: rightfactor]

Javascript Hijacking

In mid-March, Fortify chief scientist Brian Chess announced the discovery of a bug termed Javascript hijacking. The bug was very similar to earlier vulnerabilities discovered by Jeremiah Grossman and Joe Walker. These bugs are all aimed at exploiting the fact that much Web 2.0 functionality is meant to be carried out by the client-side Web browser’s Javascript engine.

The Fortify team found that all but one popular Ajax framework was susceptible to its attack, and that many custom Ajax applications not built on frameworks suffer from similar issues. In the attack, an unauthorized attacker can read confidential data from a vulnerable application because that information is transported by Javascript. Grossman’s Gmail attack was an example of one such application. This attack allowed personal information from Gmail to be leaked to an attacker through Javascript.

Javascript Hijacking counts on a screw-up in the way that the Same Origin Policy is enforced by Web browsers. The problem allows Javascript from a malicious Website to examine data loaded from a vulnerable Website, even though the Websites are not the same. JSON (Javascript Object Notation) is the most popular format for sending around information in Javascript, and JSON arrays are directly vulnerable to this kind of attack.

Very cool mashups are often written using Ajax. In many cases, a mashup will invoke a callback function that is meant to be defined by other apps in the mashup. This is a security disaster and once again shows there is a fundamental tradeoff between cool new Web functionality and security. As the Fortify team says in its paper, “An application can be mashup-friendly or it can be secure, but it cannot be both.”

Fortunately, there are short-term technical workarounds (kludges) to avoid vulnerabilities like Javascript hijacking. One approach involves tagging each request with a parameter that is hard to guess and difficult to forge. Session cookies can be used for this. Another approach is to prevent a malicious site from executing a response that has Javascript in it by requiring data modification before execution can happen (something that only a legitimate app should be able to do). Details on these approaches are spelled out in the Fortify paper. Note that these ideas really move the problem around but don’t really solve it.

The Real Security Problem With Ajax

The real problem with Web 2.0 is much bigger than data exposure problems in Javascript might suggest. The real problem is a design issue involving trust boundaries and the way developers and architects think about the software they build.

Most people who build software think of their creation as a number of components (let’s call these “boxes”) that communicate through APIs in various ways (we’ll call the communications lines “arrows”). In a traditional boxes-and-arrows software design, architects concern themselves with things like which box does what, which data flow where, and how the right kind of computations are performed in the right order. Most architects ponder a god’s eye view of the system that treats the boxes as essentially equal parts of the system.

The problem with the Web 2.0 world is that many of the boxes run on untrustworthy machines. In fact, in the worst cases, these boxes run on intentionally malicious machines owned by an attacker. Attackers can then leverage the old chestnut “make the client invisible” attack pattern to break system security.

Put in more traditional security terms, part of the computation in a Web 2.0 design happens on the “untrusted” side of a critical trust boundary. If developers forget to account for the trust boundary in their design, they end up exposing critical data, essential computations, or other valuable information assets to attackers.

Ajax makes this kind of mistake easier than ever by treating a complete software system as a set of basically equivalent boxes and arrows with little focus on trust boundaries. Plus, trust boundaries expand when sensitive data and credentials are shoved around between the client and the server.

This kind of trust boundary problem is one that security engineers have wrestled with for years when dealing with distributed systems. In our new book, Exploiting Online Games, to be released in July, Greg Hoglund and I describe myriad security problems suffered by MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft and Second Life. A majority of these exploitable, monetizable problems involve mixed-up thinking about trust boundaries, which parts of a security-critical computation can be performed where, and what kinds of assumptions game developers make. I believe that the kinds of security problems suffered by massively distributed online games are a harbinger of the kinds of security problems we’ll see in Web 2.0 software.

Until system designers gain a better understanding of trust boundaries and learn to avoid sending critical parts of their system directly to attackers, we’ll end up with poor distributed system security. Be forewarned. [Source: Darkreading]

For the last couple of years the focus has been on ‘what’, as in what is something associated with and what kinds of meta data can be used to make that content indexable and sortable. Now the goal becomes to add location data to content, thus enabling the geo aware web. The map mashup, so prevalent over the last year or two, is just the tip of the iceberg.

The next few years are going to witness amazing software that is unlike anything you’ve seen on the Internet so far. You really don’t have to think very hard to start dreaming up amazing applications for geo-aware data and how it not only makes the Internet more interesting in general, but also enables more relevant and interactive marketing.

For those who missed the metaphor, the keynote address by Jeff Huber, Google’s VP of engineering, was called “Building Blocks for Better Web Applications.”

Developers used to build stand-alone applications and sell them in shrink-wrapped boxes. Google would like to see developers connect modular blocks of code to make mashups that combine data and services from a variety of sources. To help that happen, the company rolled out new developer products to bolster the browser as an application environment and to make its services more accessible.

Chief among them was Google Gears, a free, open-source multiplatform JavaScript application programming interface that lets Web applications work offline. Gears also takes the form of a browser plug-in, but Google expects it will eventually be built into Firefox and other applications.

Gears isn’t just a Google project. Adobe, Mozilla, and Opera also have signed on. Huber demonstrated the first Gears-enabled Google application, Google Reader, operating without an Internet connection.

“For the apps to really work, this is really important, to have offline access,” said Google co-founder Sergey Brin in an interview following the keynote. “From that point of view, it’s quite strategic.”

And while industry observers have been quick to point out that a Gears-enabled version of Google Docs might finally give Microsoft Office a run for its money, Brin insisted Gears was developed because it solved a fundamental problem with online applications. “I don’t think we think about Microsoft,” he said. “It was a need that we saw we had in our applications, because it sucks to not be able to use them on a plane.”

“We’re trying to evolve the browser as a platform so it supports applications better,” explained Google group product manager Sundar Pichai.

In keeping with that goal, Google also introduced Google Mashup Editor, an online tool to help developers make mashups more easily, and Google Mapplets, which combines Google Maps and Google Gadgets, the mini-applications Google users can add to their iGoogle personalized pages.

Tempting though it might be to dismiss the ability to easily put a Google Gadget on a Google Map, Huber insisted that there really is a gadget economy taking shape. “Gadgets are really becoming a fundamental part of Google,” he said.

To underscore that point, Huber said that over 100,000 Google Gadgets had been created and that one of them, a PacMan gadget, had gotten 6.7 million page views last week. In Google’s new world order, traffic equals revenue.

Brin and Huber made clear that Google is offering more and more developer tools as a way to give back to the Internet community.

At the same time, Google’s gift pays dividends to Google. “Google started out and is primarily about search,” said Brin. “When you search, you need to have things to find out there. To us, having a rich ecosystem of sites is great.” [Source: InformationWeek]

Mashups link different Internet applications to form a new application. They are becoming the model for developers to build applications, said Jeff Huber, Google vice president of engineering, during a keynote presentation at the Google Developer Day 2007 event in San Jose, Calif.

Other building blocks in the company’s application development model include ads and standards, Huber said. Google expects developers will use technologies such as a MySQL database, a Linux OS, and programming languages such as Ruby, Python, or PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor).

“By being able to leverage these building blocks, you’re able to create amazing applications [in] probably a tenth the time,” as was previously possible, Huber said.

Google with its developer tools seeks to make the Web better; this may result in boosting traffic to the Google home page but not necessarily, according to Sundar Pichai, Google director of product management. The newly announced Google Gears project, for example, involves an extension to make Web applications work offline, Pichai noted.

“To us, we believe we benefit, users benefit, and everyone benefits if the Web works better,” Pichai said in an interview after the morning keynote.

In addition to formally unveiling Gears during the morning presentation, Huber touted two other products: Google Mashup Editor, an online editor for building mashups with a few lines of XML, and Google Mapplets, for putting online gadgets on maps. With Mapplets, an application could be built such as one that searches for hotels near an airport, according to Google.

Google’s free event in San Jose attracted 1,500 persons. Meanwhile, a total of 10 Google Developer Day 2007 events are being held throughout the world on Thursday, including in places such as Sao Paolo, Brazil, and Moscow.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the company’s president of technology, briefly addressed the audience in San Jose. The Internet, he said, has reached the point where systems can re-create themselves, such as a mashup editor that creates Internet applications using Internet applications. A compiler, meanwhile, can compile itself, Brin said.

“For the Internet to be truly self-sustaining, you really need to get the person out of the loop, and that’s why we corralled all of you here in one room today,” Brin said in jest.

On a more serious note, Brin thanked the audience. “We want to do as much as we can to repay the community that creates such a fantastic ecosystem for us to work in,” Brin said.

The explosion in interest in Google of late can be attributed to its brand awareness, said blogger Frank Taylor, author of the Google Earth Blog and an attendee in San Jose.

“Obviously, they just have a huge brand awareness and an ability to reach many people through their search engine,” Taylor said. Even when other companies do the same thing as Google, Google gets more attention, he said. Google also is attracting top talent, said Taylor.

Huber called 2006 a spectacular year for the company, with its introduction of technologies such as its AJAX search API, the Google Web Toolkit, and Google Project Hosting. [Source: Infoworld]