InfoWorld: Gartner ITxpo: Top 10 strategic technologies: March 25, 2003: By Cathleen Moore: E-business Strategies M rides atop the list, offering enterprises powerful real-time communication capabilities along with bolstered productivity. Specifically, the presence awareness functionality in IM yields the most benefit, according to Claunch. "The presence capability is the most powerful part of instant messaging," he said. "It gives you a sense of who is there and available so you can be more productive."

Comment: vertical IM is what I would like to call it...

Linux Today - Startup.co.uk: More Small Businesses Making Software Switch "According to a report in the Business, the research is expected to show that around three-quarters of small businesses in the UK are considering moving away from this software in favour of cheaper alternatives such as Linux.

Comment: Wow! this is one heck of a proportion

InfoWorld: Gartner ITxpo: Real-time strategy key to enterprise survival: March 24, 2003: By Cathleen Moore: E-business Strategies While recovery looms in the future, enterprises today must focus on squeezing more out of existing IT investments to speed decisions and improve productivity. This effort must be combined with transformations in operational, management, and leadership processes

Comment: Sounds good, mine the information you should have, and call the shots. Now step 0 make sure you understand your business, step 1 gather the info, step 2 interpret the data, all very very obvious stuff... Putting it into practice is another story, corporate wide development needs buy in from the corporation and costs money... long sales cycle, long time to ROI, not compatible with today's reality. I'd say empower the troups so that bottom up imporvements are made instead of the top to bottom approach. Make sure the little guy has an ROI, add all the little guys' ROI and see significant cost saving, at that point Corpo buy-in should be easier.

ITBusiness.ca Companies often say they thrive on innovative ideas that transform or improve their products and services. The economic downturn, however, has forced many of them to refocus their efforts on what's proven and profitable. The result is an increased tension between the need to fund research and pay attention in the bottom line. Even seasoned inventors are feeling the pressure... Michael Raynor, a director with Deloitte Research in Toronto and author of The Innovator's Solution, says approximately 80 per cent of all R&D projects fail, which naturally makes companies shy about investing in high-risk or "disruptive" innovation projects... The tricky part of managing innovation is figuring out when customer shifts will occur. One technique is to involve customers in the innovation process by setting up formal councils....

Comment: This is so how I feel somedays...

InfoWorld: Microsoft asks colleges to teach hacking: March 21, 2003: By Joris Evers: Application Development As part of an 11 week module that will start in January next year, third-year undergraduates at the University of Leeds will be asked to hack into software and fix any security bugs they find, Nick Efford, senior teaching fellow at the School of Computing, University of Leeds, said.

Comment: Could we just start by using the proper vocabulary. Hacking is not craking and vice versa.

3dA Multimedia Virtual Boardroom

Comment: Amazing that small CO can still interest the big boys in partnerships...Even more amazing that this CO has only 5 employees, and so many products... [tidbits from Ottawa Business Journal - News

Jon Udell: Reactions to the Whither Mono? column As for Mono, I regard it as just another step along the road toward commoditization of software infrastructure. What happened with network protocols and is now happening with XML must also happen, I believe, with languages and frameworks

Comment: Commoditization is sure a word I've been reading and hearing about in the last little while...It's happening everywhere.

News: The commoditization of software if expectations are created that software isn't something upon which consumers, business or otherwise, should spend much money, then that lowers the value of software, which by extension lowers the value of the programmers who make it...I'll grant that customizing software isn't as simple as buying a wider coat, but I reject the notion that companies will spend MORE on customization (or even maintain former budgets) simply because they paid less for the base cost of software. More likely, expectations of software cost will be adjusted downwards, resulting in downward pressure on developer salaries (which is happening) and a greater incentive to sublet customization to the lowest-cost location....

Comment: lots of good thinking in this artcile, now what do we do about it.

Will open source force a sea change in IT? - Tech Update - ZDNet Microsoft could do one of three things. It could attempt to enforce its intellectual property rights by preventing Ximian from distributing Mono. Or it could demand royalties from Ximian. The third option, and the long shot that I would bet on, is that Microsoft will acquire Ximian. Eventually, Microsoft might recognize that, from a market share perspective , the benefits of a Linux-based version of .Net outweigh the risks it presents to the Windows franchise. After all, the action (the revenue) is where the developers are at, and the industry-wide emphasis on service-oriented architectures has pushed developers to the application server layer.

Comment: Hey! By buying Ximian MS would annoy basically the whole OSS ecosystem, and would kill right off Mono. The other thing is Ximian is not about making money off of MONO per say, but applications based on it or that will be based on it.

InfoWorld: Forrester CEO: Web services next IT storm: March 10, 2003: By Joris Evers: Security A new "technology thunderstorm hits every five to nine years and we are due one now," Colony said in a keynote address Monday at the ICT World Forum, a conference preceding the CeBIT technology tradeshow here. The storm upon us is a big, three-part one, according to Colony. With Web services at the core, it will spawn the "XInternet," an executable and extended Internet, and "Organic IT," easily linkable IT systems, he said.

Comment: Alright I didn't know about the 5-9 years thing. I'd like to know where this is coming from. XInternet and OrganicIT, want a Bio-IDE with that? Bring on the buzz-word gallore!

Congress Clings to a Pager Made in Canada The BlackBerry is currently at the center of a patent-infringement lawsuit that threatens its future. That prompted Congress to intervene recently - an unusual action in a private lawsuit - to ask the two sides to work out their differences.

Comment: Wow Congress must loves those blackberries big time.

Mass High TechThe good news out of Beverly’s Groove Networks is that it closed a fifth round of funding Wednesday, with $38 million in new investments from Microsoft, Intel, Accel and private investors. The bad news is that 58 Groove employees were handed pink slips.

Comment: Good news for some, bad news for others. Signs points favorably to success for Groove, I just keep on realising how much collaboration across business boundaries is the cards (yeah I know, talk about stating the obvious). The drawback of Groove in my mind is to have to use the whole workspace and all. Wouldn't be better to enable collaboration in applications themselves, at the file system level, or at the document level?

How do these IT priorities compare to your own? - Tech Update - ZDNet Networking upgrades tallies as the top initiative impacting IT over the next 12 to 24 months. In the the next 18 to 24 months, the move to mobilize the workforce will become more critical. Remote access and wireless projects will expand, and VPN, VOIP, LAN, and WAN deployments will become key to staying competitive.

Comment: Check out NetCelera This is a product about immediate ROI on your bandwidth usage when dealing with remote offices. This is from a company I've known for a long time I used to deal with them in my Corel days, ages ago, I kept in touch with their CEO Youssri Helmy, a great and what one could call persistent kinda guy!

Internet Access Methods Now you can build Desktop or Web accessible Collaboration directly into your branded or corporate applications without the need for special software or framework installation.

Comment: Interesting. They are in the p2p collaboration business for programmers. I'm curious to learn more about this, since I think this is an underserved category for the size of the industry. I mean more and more development teams are all over the globe...