John Funnel on Ulitzer Earlier this year one of my staff attended a SYS-CON event and returned to the office a different person. Revitalised and motivated. I asked her what happened at the event to warrant such a transformation? What was her secret? Was it the New York Shopping experience? A business Romance or was it Devine intervention? She simply advised me to ‘check out Ulitzer. – Everyone who is anyone is on it’. She was not the first to introduce me to the innovation. Many of my peers had gone through such noticeable changes, It was like a weight had been lifted from their shoulders, that they now had a true portal to vent out their innermost thoughts. I was instantly intrigued by such recommendations. People, just like me, were using Ulitzer everywhere. So what had I been fighting against all this time? What was I avoiding? Eventually I succumbed to the in... (more)

As Times Square Ball Drops, EarthCam's There Live

New Year 2010 on Ulitzer On December 31, EarthCam (www.earthcam.com), the world's favorite webcam network and industry leader in webcam technology, webcast its 14th annual New Year's Eve Times Square interactive celebration live from New York City and locations around the world. EarthCam brought the world's largest party in Times Square directly to visitors live in real time via its interactive New Year's website and without commercial interruption. The evening's events were also accessible through mobile devices, including the iPhone. In this year'sNew Year 2010 event (http://newyears.earthcam.com/), there were 25 live camera views from Times Square. Viewers were able to choose from among the New York cameras throughout the day and enjoy events from viewpoints they chose. Cameras available for selection in additional locations throughout the world included Moscow,... (more)

The Next Chapter in the Virtualization Story Begins

Cloud Expo Europe €550 Savings here! Cloud Expo West $800 Savings here! Cloud Computing Journal recently caught up with Pete Malcolm, CEO of cloud management innovators Abiquo - a major new player in the fast-emerging Cloud ecosystem and Platinum Plus Sponsor of 6th Cloud Expo being held in Prague, the Czech Republic, 21-22 June 2010. Malcolm is keynoting at the event. His theme will be "An Open Cloud Ecosystem - the Gathering Storm." Explore Cloud Expo Sponsorship & Exhibit Opportunities ! Abiquo was also Platinum Plus Sponsor of the 5th International Cloud Expo held April 19-21, 2010 at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City Cloud Computing Journal: How would you define the difference between Private clouds and Public Clouds, and why is the distinction so important in the context of Cloud Computing? Pete Malcolm: Actually, I think people get rather too hun... (more)

Understanding Business Intelligence and Your Bottom Line

The term "Business Intelligence" and its acronym "BI" are so pervasive in today's data-intensive lexicon that it's a challenge to know just what to make of it. If you add in all the new trendy terminology such as business process management (BPM), data mining, data warehousing, business process automation, decision support systems, query and reporting systems, enterprise performance management, executive information systems (EIS), business activity monitoring (BAM), modeling and visualization, and so forth, your head can start spinning. Here is a workable definition of BI that was provided in a Technology Evaluation report from a January 10, 2005, Technology Evaluation Centers article by Mukhles Zaman entitled, "Business Intelligence: Its Ins and Outs": "BI is neither a product nor a system. It is an umbrella term that combines architectures, applications, and databa... (more)

'Internet of Things' Patterns By @ReidCarlberg | @ThingsExpo [#IoT]

Whether you're a startup or a 100 year old enterprise, the Internet of Things offers a variety of new capabilities for your business. IoT style solutions can help you get closer your customers, launch new product lines and take over an industry. Some companies are dipping their toes in, but many have already taken the plunge, all while dramatic new capabilities continue to emerge. Register for @ThingsExpo "FREE" (before Friday) ▸ Here In his session at Internet of @ThingsExpo, Reid Carlberg, Senior Director, Developer Evangelism at Salesforce.com, will discuss real-world use cases, patterns and opportunities you can harness today. Reid Carlberg's Salesforce IoT Presentation at @ThingsExpo New York Download Slide Deck: ▸ Here In his session at @ThingsExpo New York, Reid Carlberg, Senior Director at Salesforce.com, discussed business processes ripe for IoT style solut... (more)

Five Reasons Data Virtualization By @Anne_Buff | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]

Five Reasons for IT Leaders to Consider Data Virtualization It is no doubt that the latest and greatest technologies get your juices flowing. Researching the details, comparing the benchmarks, imagining the differences you could make within your organization if you could just put the right technology solutions in the right place. If only budgets and time were endless. If only you could start again from scratch. How different things would be. Insert screeching record and your return to reality. You are not only tasked with integrating legacy systems the business has relied on for years and numerous data sources scattered throughout the organization but now the expectation (and excitement) is to integrate Big Data. What the what? As you shake (or bang) your head in disbelief, stop for a moment and consider data virtualization. Data virtualization is the process of pr... (more)

Building Clouds on @VMware vSphere | @CloudExpo [#Cloud]

Building Clouds on VMware vSphere This case study assumes you want to build a private cloud on top of an existing virtualized datacenter composed of multiple hosts running vSphere and managed by one or several instances of vCenter. It is understood that you do not want to abandon your investment in VMware by retooling the entire stack. You want to continue managing your infrastructure with already familiar and powerful VMware tools, such as vSphere and vCenter Operations Manager. Your goal is to create a self-service cloud environment on top of your vSphere infrastructure to provide your users with a simple cloud interface featuring elasticity, multi-tenancy and self-service provisioning. This post compares the pricing of two different approaches to build this cloud environment, the deployment of vOneCloud (an open-source replacement for vCloud based on OpenNebula) ... (more)

XML Middleware: XML and Messaging

XML has been used in applications as a means of passing data between heterogeneous applications, to provide metainformation over content and maintain structure in data. Simply put, if HTML is the language to display information, XML is the language that can speak business terms or jargon. In this article I'll discuss the fact that XML enables applications to organize and process information better on the enterprise. For this application I refer to Java technology for mail, servlets and messaging. Messaging Messaging is an integral part of most Internet-related applications because it handles data better for easier transaction management. It's used in the enterprise to exchange data between two heterogeneous applications. For example, data comes into the enterprise through the Internet and then is sent to the back-end ERP application/system. The messages come via HTTP a... (more)

UML, MOF, and XMI

In today's environment it's becoming more and more difficult to develop well-architectured software for two reasons: the size and complexity of software keeps growing and the target environments are becoming more and more complex. In other words, today's environments are distributed and highly heterogeneous. Applications are so large that one doesn't develop stand-alone systems anymore - applications are developed from existing components and are likely to use common services available in the target implementation environment. Since networks - especially the Internet - facilitate interoperability, today's applications need to interoperate with other applications and share information with them. Through modeling, architects attempt to manage the complexity of software systems better. The model allows the software architect to separate design from implementation: it... (more)

Extensibility or Fragmentation

In my last column (XML-J, Vol. 1, issue 1) I talked about XML's extensibility and how it's the key to building dynamic systems. But that begs the question: Does the freedom to extend a data structure create new opportunities, or is it another example of flexibility run amok? The debate over supporting extended or XML data structures has been taken one step further to include support of different schemas - or vocabularies. The proliferation of XML vocabularies (and sometimes competing ones) has many people worried about fragmentation. But fear not. What to Do About All Those Vocabularies... If XML is supposed to be the universal common language so that all systems can talk to each other, what's the deal with all these vocabularies? Doesn't that defeat the purpose? As I see it, we're at a crossroads. The development community can take the traditional route and conclude... (more)

XML - Friend or Foe?

At Tradeum Inc. we became early adopters of XML just a few months after the publication of the XML standard in February 1998. Our reasons were compelling: we were creating a dynamic trading engine that implements auctions and true exchanges in a business-to-business environment. At the heart of the application was a parametric matching engine that matches buyer-and-seller offers based on industry-specific parameters describing the goods to be traded, price and other terms and conditions, and buyer and seller identity. What better data framework for receiving parametric buy-and-sell offers than XML, the framework in which more and more industries would be standardizing data interchanges? By creating a trading engine that works with any DTD (as opposed to the approach that imposes a DTD such as cXML, which is more suited to catalogued goods), our customers - the marke... (more)