Vitria Technology has announced a Web 2.0 BPM suite that enables business users to model, manage, monitor, and optimize their business processes - Vitria's M3O. Business analysts can model and execute business processes in a Web-based environment in direct collaboration with their IT counterparts.

'We are committed to lowering the barrier to entry for developers around the world to build a more collaborative and dynamic Internet,' said Chris DeWolfe, CEO and co-founder of MySpace, 'while empowering our members to take control of their online presence in new and exciting ways.' DeWolfe was speaking as MySpace today announced the launch of the MySpace Developer Platform Site, which he described as 'a place for developers to connect and learn about, build, test, and deploy MySpace applications.'

AJAXWorld Conference & Expo, March 18-20, 2008, in New York City will provide an overview of Canoo's RIA technology as compared to its other European competitors. Upcoming AJAXWorld Conference is demonstrating a stronger interest and participation from delegates around Europe. Canoo announced a new release of its Java library for Rich Internet Applications (RIA), UltraLightClient (ULC). This new 6.2 version offers addons to test UltraLightClient-based applications more easily.

Within the past few years, Web 2.0 has become a major technology trend, dramatically impacting the way consumers interact with information and applications. This consumer trend is now extending into the enterprise; however, businesses have been more reluctant than consumers to adopt these new technologies.

After a process of careful evaluation, eZ Publish from eZ Systems was selected to help the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Controller's Office meet its primary objectives - to provide easy-to-find, relevant information for the MIT user community, and to offer a secure, efficient, user-friendly tool for content maintainers to control the website's contents and design.

Sun is offering ten grants of US $11,500 - equivalent to several months of pay for developers in some countries - for the best NetBeans projects submitted by open source developers. Conceived as a means of increasing general awareness around the NetBeans project as well as rewarding good work done by the NetBeans Community, the 'Dreams of Reality' contest is described in detail by worldwide NetBeans Community Manager Bruno Souza, the charismatic Brazilian developer, in a special audio webcast currently playing on SYS-CON.TV.

Google, which does not give guidance, missed both Wall Street's top and bottom expectations for its December quarter by a hair and the punters turned vicious pounding it down around 50 bucks after-hours. Consensus demanded non-GAAP earnings of $4.44 on revenues of $3.45 billion. Google came in with $4.43 on revenues $3.39 billion. Those revenues figures are net of what's called TAC, Google's traffic acquisition costs, the money it pays its partners, which it this case amounted $1.44 billion or 30% of its ad revenues.

Phurnace announced support for JBoss web application servers with the availability of its newest version, Phurnace Deliver 3.3. The latest release, available in mid-February, provides IT operations staff with the resources they need to decrease configuration errors, which is one of the biggest sources of downtime. The software reduces deployment times and associated costs for faster, more cohesive enterprise Java deployments on the leading open source web application server. Phurnace Deliver 3.3 is implemented with an Eclipse Rich Client Platform user interface, providing enhanced 'console-like' functionality for the JBoss server.

Nexaweb announced its membership to the HP Governance Interoperability Framework (GIF). GIF provides a collaborative, standards-based approach for publishing, associating, accessing and managing service-oriented architecture (SOA) metadata and business service information across multiple vendors and technologies. Nexaweb's membership to HP GIF bridges the gap between SOA and application development, which helps to make it easier to build Web-based business applications using governed services from a central repository.

IBM announced it will establish the first Cloud Computing Center for software companies in China, which will be situated at the new Wuxi Tai Hu New Town Science and Education Industrial Park in Wuxi, China. The center will offer emerging Chinese software companies the ability to tap into a virtual computing environment to support their development activities. It will be established through an agreement signed today between IBM and Wuxi Tai Lake Industry Investment and Development Company Limited.

Less than 10 years ago, still in its infancy, the Internet was a land of promise for businesses. Companies saw bright new ways to increase their agility, reach more customers and to deliver new, never-before-seen services. Unquestionably since then it has transformed the way consumers and businesses exchange information and has become a vital part of nearly every organization's communication and operational architecture.

Imagine you are a contestant on a TV game show and your grinning quiz master pops the question: 'Name the one thing you most associate with Google?' Think about your answer - write it on a card (don't show me yet). Turning your card over, it's likely to be one of the following...Great Internet search engine on google.com; Wicked share price, wish I'd bought some a few years ago; Powerhouse of innovation for Java

jMaki is an AJAX framework that provide a wrapper over rich widgets from multiple toolkits such as Yahoo!, Dojo and many others. jMaki-wrapped widgets can be easily used in a JSP, Rails, PHP and Phobos app. This session will explain what jMaki is and show using live code demos how easy it is to embed jMaki widgets in different pages.

OpSource announced that LitSoft has chosen OpSource On-Demand to deliver LitScope, the electronic discovery industry's first Web 2.0 electronically stored information (ESI) review platform. LitScope will enable LitSoft's law firm and corporate clients to use any main-stream Web browser, running on any main-stream operating system, to access its documents from anywhere in the world where an Internet connection is available. LitScope includes many advanced features such as full Unicode support, search-based batching, a review management dashboard, and many others, all packaged in an extremely intuitive Web 2.0 interface and backed by 24/7 end user support via dedicated toll free phone.

Amazon's DRM-free MP3 digital music store is going inernational. That, according to Bill Carr, Amazon.com Vice President of Digital Music, is the plan for 2008. 'We have received thousands of e-mails from Amazon customers around the world asking us when we will make Amazon MP3 available outside of the U.S. They can't wait to choose from the biggest selection of high-quality, low-priced DRM-free MP3 music downloads which play on virtually any music device they own today or will own in the future,' said Carr in a statement yesterday.

This presentation will compare and constrast web application virtualization solutions such as WebSphere Extended Deployment and hardware virtualization solutions. Particular emphasis will be provided on how the two solutions can be combined to provide the most flexible web application hosting environment.

The success of SOA runs two ways. SOA serves as the catalyst for organizational change, yet an organization must be ready to embrace these new dimensions opened up by SOA. The latest survey data shows most organizations are just starting on their SOA journeys. Why do enterprises set out to build a Service Oriented Architecture, but end up with a 'Service Averse Architecture'? There are many promises being made about the potential of SOA these days, followed by disillusionment as these promises don't pan out. However, SOA is more than a single IT project or even a series of implementations. Rather, SOA represents a long-term change in thinking and management of all aspects of the enterprise. SOA not only decomposes technology into loosely coupled systems, but also decomposes organizations into 'loosely coupled businesses.' This session will look at the latest survey data on ways organizations are embracing service oriented architecture, and how far along the road most are from full-functioning SOA.

Adoption of federated identity technology has been slower than the hype might indicate, despite the maturity of standards such as SAML 2.0 and Web Services Security. This presentation examines the distinct business and technical identity management issues in both the commercial and user-centric spheres, and important catalysts to drive successful deployment.

The New York Post has done it again. Its report on Thursday that Microsoft is once more contemplating a potential acquisition of Yahoo! has set the industry on fire with rumors, views, and counterviews. Here we bring you a round-up of what's being said and written.

Fueled by the explosive growth in digital media and user generated content, the demand for storage has increased exponentially, placing significant stress on current 'in house' storage architectures and costly overcapacity build-outs. Factoring in time-to-market pressures as well as power, space, large capital expenditures, global performance, load balancing and availability issues, companies are faced with an exploding challenges and costs to go with the exploding storage demand. Bottom line, companies must take a new approach to storage. Companies need to move from the old and out-dated storage 1.0 model of 'do everything yourself' to a new storage 2.0 model. The storage 2.0 model delivers persistent storage on demand to applications regardless of location and pre-defined boundaries and meets the performance and scalability characteristics of the web applications.

Web Developers these days should use libraries, for the main reason that all libraries want the same thing: make it easier for developers to think about building their applications rather than worrying about quirks and failures of Web browsers. Some libraries go even further in giving a helping hand to the aspriring Web application architect. The YUI for example has a Custom Event feature which can be used to create massive applications that can be easily maintained and are fully extendable. This session explains the architectural ideas of event-driven application development and shows examples how this is helpful for AJAX applications.

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is finally being adopted at various enterprise environments after years of conceptualization and testing. However, the rapid rise of Web 2.0 puts SOA enterprise architecture into question: This session will explore: Do Web 2.0 and SOA play together? What are the best ways to leverage SOA investment in a Web 2.0 world? What is the best way to build and deploy Web 2.0 solutions based on SOA? What do Web 2.0 technologies like Rich Internet Applications and AJAX mean to SOA? What is a ?mash-up?? Do ?mash-ups? compete against SOA? Drawing upon the speaker?s years of experience in pioneering Web 2.0 and several thousand of enterprise engagements, this session presents an enterprise Web 2.0 reference architecture that integrates SOA and Web 2.0 technologies. The session will show how different vendors/products form a Web2.0 and SOA ecosystem.

The Web needs fixing. The standards and recommendations that define the Web were last revised in 1999. Since then, the Web has grown from a document retrieval system into an application delivery system. We have made significant progress since then, due to the cleverness of the Web development community and the surprising expressive power of JavaScript, but we are at the limits. The Web is no longer a driver of innovation. It is now a serious impediment. The Web is overly complex. It is visually underpowered. It is hopelessly insecure. It is now under competitive assault by new proprietary platforms that hope to capture the next generation of applications. Can a system as large and as open as the Web heal and adapt itself to the challenges of the 21st Century?

Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 have brought IT organizations a set of capabilities to better meet the demands of business users. However, IT needs to be proactive and build processes to enable agility and creativity, and deploy these assets with appropriate enterprise-level control. What level of performance, control, compliance will ensure team success? And how can you reduce costs and development times for better enterprise value? This session will overview Enterprise 2.0 Mashup capabilities from IBM and Sonoa Systems, and elaborate on best practices, using real-world scenarios of how they tackled these issues with customers.

EMC announced its newest distributed document capture solution that offers dramatic advances in Web-based distributed capture?EMC Captiva eInput 2.0. Key to streamlining paper-based transactional processes, eInput 2.0 makes the scanning and indexing of paper documents from remote offices faster and easier.

DreamFace Interactive provides a revolutionary new way for web-savvy business people to create, control, and share their own web applications, through a unique and innovative concept called WebChannels that make possible the creation of applications designed for change. The company's goal is to promote the DIY (Do IT Yourself) RIA notion coupled to the Web 2.0 fast-growing phenomenon and encourage users to be a real actor in the definition, creation and publication of interactive and intuitive new generation of applications, where the Internet, the Intranet or both are the core platform.

Nexaweb's Enterprise Web 2.0 solution is an application development and deployment platform that increases productivity by minimizing painful coding; improves efficiency through the re-use of legacy and SOA assets; and creates a more agile business by delivering secure, mission-critical applications over the Web. With Nexaweb, building enterprise-strength composite and mashup solutions using Ajax and Java UI applications that access legacy and service-oriented data systems is simple. And because it's done in a unified declarative XML development environment, it doesn't require re-writing code. Only Nexaweb's comprehensive Enterprise Web 2.0 solutions are backed by an established methodology and reference architecture proven by more than 5,000 successful global deployments. Nexaweb's brand-name customer roster includes Aflac Japan, Ameripath, ARTstor, Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi, Best Western Hotels, EMC, Jefferies & Co., Inc., and Nokia Siemens Networks.

The recent popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo are costing UK corporations close to £6.5 billion annually in lost productivity, according to a poll conducted by Information security consultancy - Global Secure Systems (GSS) and Infosecurity Europe 2008 www.infosec.co.uk.

Incansoft announced the release of its latest web application, WEB 2.0 Video Gadgets. Based on the YouTube Developer API and built in PHP and AJAX, Video Gadgets is designed to allow web site owners to seamlessly integrate targeted video from youtube.com for enhancing visitor experience. Providing web site visitors with interactive WEB 2.0 style content is vital to maintain stickiness, according to Mr. Diego Hernando, Incansoft SAC VP Product Development.

Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) run inside web browsers and provide a much more dynamic user experience than conventional web pages. While traditional HTML-based pages require a full reload of the page when the user clicks on a link, many modern web pages only reload parts of the page and provide animations to dynamically navigate through an information space. There are several platforms to implement such dynamic web pages, for example AJAX, Flash, Java FX, Microsoft Silverlight, OpenLaszlo, XUL.

It's not the latest sequel to the 'Jason versus Freddie' movie, it's one of the decisions you need to make if you're rolling out a Web 2.0 product. Make the wrong choice, and your project and reputation can suffer. Make the right choice, and you can be a hero. There aren't any easy answers, but I can take you on a tour of the technology and the decisions involved so you can make a better-informed choice. During our tour I promise you won?t be attacked by a man in a hockey mask, so sit back and enjoy the ride.

The main concern of any project manager is if there are enough people in the pool of Flex developers to staff the project. Yes, there is a pool of Flex developers, but let's look at the creature called 'Flex Developer' under the microscope. If you are considering adding Flex to your set of skills, it?s still early in the game and you can join the fast growing Flex community. Decide which group of the Flex developers looks most appealing to you. Set a goal and go for it. Be what you can be.

Okay there are thousands of rich internet applications (RIAs) out there that I could write about but I'm trying to be very selective in order to provide a good sampling of different uses of RIAs and their advantages. Being pretty is one thing, but being incredibly functional is what makes RIAs exciting. For example, check out http://www.buzzword.com. You can sign up in about 45 seconds and start creating documents that can be saved as Microsoft Word format, RTF or XML (Microsoft Word 2003).

The Web needs fixing. The standards and recommendations that define the Web were last revised in 1999. Since then, the Web has grown from a document retrieval system into an application delivery system. We have made significant progress since then, due to the cleverness of the Web development community and the surprising expressive power of JavaScript, but we are at the limits. The Web is no longer a driver of innovation. It is now a serious impediment.

Wedding retail specialist Truly Wedding has changed the way retailers engage customers by launching two new websites that harness the latest web 2.0 technology and marketing techniques. The websites are exceptionally user friendly, plug-in to the popularity of social networking and provide a unique pricing system that eliminates confusion and helps couples save a fortune on wedding costs.

A more interesting question is 'Is XML on the web trending up or trending down?' Clearly, it is trending down. For data transfer applications, XML is losing ground to JSON because JSON is simply a better data transfer format. And XHTML has failed to displace HTML in the marketplace. The benefit of clientside validation has proven to not be a benefit. I think you can argue, and in fact I did argue, that because of W3C's adventures with XML, the web itself may not have a future. The browser has a lot of problems, the worst of which are the security problems that came with Netscape Navigator 2. That was 12 years ago, and there has been no progress since that time in fixing the fundamental problems. There have been lots of patches on top of patches. Nothing more.

More and more enterprises are looking into how they can benefit from mashups to improve their business. Unfortunately, many of the best-known mashups today are more consumer oriented. Many mashup examples do not pay justice to the real enterprise value of mashups and they certainly don't explain why mashups are something every company needs to start using.

As a web 2.0 guy who blogs on 'Direct from Web 2.0', I did not see this coming. In fact, my preferences were Mitt Romney from the republican side (maybe McCain too) and Hilary Clinton from the democrat side. I think the three of them (Mitt Romney, John McCain and Hilary Clinton) will do better in the oval office than other candidates. Just like how venture capitalists pick CEOs for their portfolio companies, I put 'experience' and -track record of execution' very high in my assessment. If you are conducting a CEO search for your company, would you pick someone who just graduated from Harvard executive MBA, or someone who has been there, done that and has been doing that for the entire life?

Nexaweb Technologies, Inc. announced it has been selected for the annual Editors' Choice Award from CMP's Intelligent Enterprise. The 2008 award was bestowed upon a list of 48 companies that provide exceptional vision, technology innovation and customer leadership in attaining strategic objectives.

Now let's consider the most-seen AJAX powered mashup: modifications of map sites, adding real estate pictures and locations to a map, for example. This sort of thing would be made a lot easier and accessible if the real estate agents published an RSS-like feed of properties, along with their GPS coordinates and prices. Even in this limited scope the possibilities are endless, a burger chain could publish the locations of its restaurants, or news bulletins could come attached with markers. Planes, trains, and - well, possibly - automobiles could be tracked and tacked onto maps. Want to see where the roadworks are on your journey? Just import the official highway's feed of roadworks into any mapping site or software of your choosing.