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Posts Tagged ‘Web Applications’

eXo raises $6M to build onto Java applications

eXo, provider of services that accelerate Java web sites and applications in cloud environments, has brought in $6 million in a first round of funding. Based in San Francisco, Calif., the company is backed by Auriga Partners and XAnge Capital. It plans to use the new financing to expand its sales and marketing operations in North America. It already has a strong-presence in France.

Companies: Auriga Partners, eXo, XAnge Capital

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Are Modern Web Apps Killjoys?

Is ‘checking in’ at places using location-based mobile apps like Foursquare and Brightkite resulting in us enjoying life a little less? Is there such a thing as too much data for a fun activity such as running? We address these and other questions in the final installment of our interview with Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing.

Modern web applications are packed with features that ostensibly connect us more to the real world and our activities in it. Foursquare uses location data to connect us with places and people. Nike+ shoes deliver data from your feet to your iPod. All of this new data from the real world is good progress, right? Yes, the more data the better! On the other hand, is our focus on data distracting us from actually enjoying life?

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Adam Greenfield doesn’t like Foursquare, a location-based social networking mobile app that has become popular over the past year. He told me that he loved Foursquare at first and enjoyed ‘checking in’ at places. But then he found that he spent the first few minutes of going into a place updating Foursquare with his location, which he realized could be time better spent actually enjoying the place and socializing with the people around him.

Technology has always had an anti-social element to it. For example, Twitter. When you’re in a social situation and you stop to tweet it, that disconnects you from the real world (at least for 30 seconds while you tap out 140 characters on your mobile phone).

Step back further into the mists of technological progress and there is the issue of cellphone calls in social situations. When you’re talking with someone and that person’s cellphone rings, then they answer it and have a conversation with someone else on their cellphone – is there anything more annoying than that from a social point of view?

So technology can be anti-social; nothing new in that. But is a mobile location-based app like Foursquare not only anti-social, but also distracting us from enjoying our surroundings because we’re so intent on documenting where we are?

The counter argument is that products like Foursquare make it easier for you to meet up with your friends in real life, particularly if you’re young and socializing a lot. For example you might see that a few of your friends are at a local cafe or pub, so you go out to join them there. That definitely makes Foursquare a fun product. But it’s a use case that mostly applies to young, highly social people.

It’s not just location-based apps that are potentially killjoys.

Greenfield also spoke about his experience with Nike+ running shoes, which come with a sensor that tracks your run and sends the data to your iPod. As we explained earlier this month, Nike+ has its own social network. Nike+ can also send updates to Twitter and post a status report on Facebook.

According to Adam Greenfield, Nike+ changed the way he ran. Because the shoes could quantify his running performance, he said that they made him faster and more competitive. However, he also began to feel guilty if he missed a run – because the data would suffer as a result. So despite making him a better runner, the Nike+ shoes resulted in him "not having as much fun."

What do you think – are you finding that modern web apps, whether location-based mobile apps or products with sensors or something else data-driven, are making you enjoy life just a little less? Are you focusing too much on the data, rather than just living life? Let us know in the comments.

See also Part 1 of our interview with Adam Greenfield, in which we discussed the impact of the iPhone and other smartphones on the Internet of Things. We also talked about the differences between the U.S. and Asia in adoption of these technologies. In Part 2, we focused on how the iPad may become the missing link between Internet-connected items in your home, for example the Internet fridge, and the Web.

Photo credits: whatleydude; Ed Yourdon

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feature: The Ars Technica Guide to I/O Virtualization

Virtualization is a key enabling technology for the modern datacenter. Without virtualization, tricks like load balancing and multitenancy wouldn’t be available from datacenters that use commodity x86 hardware to supply the on-demand compute cycles and networked storage that powers the current generation of cloud-based web applications.

Even though it has been used pervasively in datacenters for the past few years, virtualization isn’t standing still. Rather, the technology is still evolving, and with the launch of I/O virtualization support from Intel and AMD it’s poised to reach new levels of performance and flexibility. Our past virtualization coverage looked at the basics of what virtualization is, and how processors are virtualized. The current installment will take a close look at how I/O virtualization is used to boost the performance of individual servers by better virtualizing parts of the machine besides the CPU.

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Joojoo tablet now in production, will support full Flash at launch

Continue reading Joojoo tablet now in production, will support full Flash at launch

Joojoo tablet now in production, will support full Flash at launch originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ReadWriteStart Weekly Wrapup

With the first week of 2010 in the books, we thought we would take a look at the most popular posts of the new year in this week’s weekly wrapup. In this edition we’ve got tips for funding advice, keeping organized and building loyal communities, but be sure to check out the newest post in our new series “Never Mind the Valley,” highlighting thriving startup communities outside of Silicon Valley.

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5 Web Apps To Keep Your Startup Organized

In a world where emails, phone calls, texts, and Tweets constantly bombard us, it is getting harder and harder to manage the firehose of data and information being thrust our way. For young companies to succeed this environment, it is imparitive they become organized and efficient lest they fall behind and quickly become overwhelmed.

While there is no shortage of online solutions, it can be hard to know which one is the right tool for the job, so here’s a list of five web applications to help kick-start your company and keep it organized without breaking the bank.

5 Great Blogs For Funding Advice

The best advice we can give you is to know your audience. You don’t try to sell booze to pregnant women, you don’t make God-jokes in Utah and you don’t get a term sheet without tailoring your pitch. Investors are already blogging about what they want from potential portfolio companies, so if you’re looking for funding you should be reading their blogs. While we know there are plenty of useful investment-related blogs, here’s a list of five to get you started.

Community First: How Wufoo Created a Captive Audience

So you’ve got a fabulous idea for a startup? That’s great, but before you get wide-eyed and start thinking about wireframes, venture capital and moving to San Francisco, get your feet wet first by beginning to build your community.

Having a strong and loyal community behind you is an important step in the startup process. After all, it will be much easier to convince a potential investor of the viability of your product if there is a thriving community eager to get their hands on it.

Never Mind the Valley: Here’s Los Angeles

Best known for its movie stars, sun and surf, Los Angeles probably isn’t the first place you’d think to breed technology. But when you consider the influence of investors like Jason Calacanis and Mark Suster, in addition to the fact that companies like Demand Media and Docstoc call Southern California home, it’s not surprising that the community is emerging as one of the country’s hottest startup hubs. ReadWriteWeb caught up with some defining characters of the LA Tech scene to find out why they’ve made their homes away from the traditional tech haunts of Silicon Valley.

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5 Web Apps To Keep Your Startup Organized

In a world where emails, phone calls, texts, and Tweets constantly bombard us, it is getting harder and harder to manage the firehose of data and information being thrust our way. For young companies to succeed this environment, it is imparitive they become organized and efficient lest they fall behind and quickly become overwhelmed.

While there is no shortage of online solutions, it can be hard to know which one is the right tool for the job, so here’s a list of five web applications to help kick-start your company and keep it organized without breaking the bank.

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Google Apps – Google’s collection of web apps includes solutions for corporate email accounts, calendars or contacts, but its best use for a new startup is with document sharing. Using Google Docs to collaborate on text documents, spreadsheets or even presentations is far more efficient than sending a file in an email attachment.

In recent years, Zoho has become an increasingly competitive enterprise alternative to Google, even adding integration with Google Apps. Zoho has also introduced more features that help it stand out against Google Apps, including their own CRM solution that aims to compete with Salesforce.com.

Basecamp – We here at ReadWriteWeb use Basecamp on a daily basis for managing ongoing projects and reviewing edits of our stories. Developed by 37signals, Basecamp offers a great interface with an easily read dashboard of the latest activity, as well as to-do lists, milestones and email alerts.

For the on-the-go entrepreneur, there are a handful of mobile Basecamp apps ranging in features and price. Personally, I recommend using Insight for iPhone, which was rebranded from Encamp and recently recommended by 37signals.

Dropbox – Whether it’s large financial spreadsheets, or Photoshop mockups of your website-to-be, you are going to need somewhere to store all your files. Dropbox makes all of these easy and relatively inexpensive, offering up to 100 GB for $20 a month. But it’s not just storage.

Dropbox can automatically sync with folders on your desktop, creating an offsite backup of your vital startup files in the cloud, which any member of your staff can access. An alternative solution would be to use Box.net, however their pricing plans are higher than Dropbox’s and are aimed at larger corporations.

Dimdim – The next time you find yourself struggling to explain an intricate concept to your coworkers through a text document or presentation, check out Dimdim and use the power of screen-sharing to make your point crystal clear. One of Dimdim’s best features is that their product works entirely from within your web browser without the need to download or install any extra software.

Screen-sharing services like Dimdim can save a young company hundreds if not thousands of dollars in travel expenses by providing a much more efficient way to meet and share information. Also a notable service in this space is Citrix’s GoToMeeting. However, like Box.net to Dropbox, its pricing is much higher than Dimdim’s.

MindMeister – Between the last two semesters of graduate school, I worked on a collaborative ten-week reporting project, and used online mind-mapping app MindMeister extensively to stay organized. The application is a great way to keep those more abstract ideas organized in an easy-to-understand way.

Countless startups have mapped out their product ideas and business plans on giant whiteboards, and now the whiteboard has gone digital. MindMeister makes it easy to create and share mind maps and flow charts, and best of all, its free to get started.

Photo by Flickr user simax.

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For Google, The Meaning Of Open Is When It’s Convenient For Them

Yesterday, Google published a long manifesto on the “meaning of open” in the form of an email to all employees republished as a blog post. In it, senior VP of product management Jonathan Rosenberg, makes an eloquent argument for why open systems always win and urges Google’s employees to always strive to be open when designing products. An open Internet spurs innovation and brings more consumers on board, which ultimately means more searches and increased use of Web applications.

The gist of his argument is that a bigger, better Internet is good for Google. He writes that Google employees should resist the impulse to create closed products and systems, and even makes a swipe at Apple for doing so (bold added for emphasis):

. . . open systems win. This is counter-intuitive to the traditionally trained MBA who is taught to generate a sustainable competitive advantage by creating a closed system, making it popular, then milking it through the product life cycle. The conventional wisdom goes that companies should lock in customers to lock out competitors. . . . a well-managed closed system can deliver plenty of profits. They can also deliver well-designed products in the short run — the iPod and iPhone being the obvious examples — but eventually innovation in a closed system tends towards being incremental at best (is a four blade razor really that much better than a three blade one?) because the whole point is to preserve the status quo. Complacency is the hallmark of any closed system. If you don’t have to work that hard to keep your customers, you won’t.

It all sounds great and Google certainly is a champion of open systems with Android and Chrome and countless other projects. Google is making a very public effort to claim the mantle of openness. But the battle for this mantle has been going on for a long time. Two years ago, I wrote a post titled “Who Is The Opennest Of Them All?”. What I noted then bears repeating:

But don’t be fooled. Companies are very selective about the areas where they choose to be open, and they very rarely open up their core source of profits voluntarily. . . . So the next time a company touts how open it is, ask yourself how that will help it make more money. Don’t confuse openness with altruism.

Google is only open when it is convenient for them. Google will never open up the source code to its search algorithms or its advertising system, or share the core data which gives it a competitive advantage in those areas because that is where it makes all of its money. Again, I pointed this out in that post two years ago:

Just because industry pressures and increased interconnectedness are forcing companies to embrace open technologies, don’t confuse openness with profitability. Open standards tend to be good for spurring the adoption of new technologies, but not so good for generating profits directly. That is why companies choose to be open along axes where they don’t compete. Google, for instance, is a big proponent of open standards in social networking, mobile networks, Web applications, and practically everywhere —except the one place it makes money. Its advertising system is a black box. You also never hear any talk coming out of Google about opening up the search algorithms that drive all of those advertising revenues. In contrast, Google has no problem championing open standards in industries that it is hoping to disrupt (by commoditizing existing business models with open standards, and making money with advertising instead).

Rosenberg realizes there is an incongruity between what he is saying and what Google is doing. He takes a stab at rationalizing this huge exception to Google’s embrace of everything open:

While we are committed to opening the code for our developer tools, not all Google products are open source. Our goal is to keep the Internet open, which promotes choice and competition and keeps users and developers from getting locked in. In many cases, most notably our search and ads products, opening up the code would not contribute to these goals and would actually hurt users.

Maybe, but it is more likely it would hurt Google. The company has good reasons for keeping those things closed tight. Opening up those black boxes would make it easier to spam search and game AdWords and give competitors valuable data to make their own search engines and advertising systems better. If it opened all of that stuff up, it would have to work harder to keep its customers.

And really nobody should begrudge them the right to keep products they’ve spent a lot of time, energy, and money building to themselves. But don’t give us this song and dance about how everything should be open and how Google is the opennest company in the world. Google has nothing to lose if operating systems, mobile phones, browsers, books, news, and every other industry becomes open and free, as long it can make money from search and advertising. That is exactly why Google is so disruptive. It can offer products for free that other industries charge for, as long as those products result in more searches or other advertising opportunities.

There is nothing wrong with this strategy. The fact that Google is pushing openness in so many industries is generally a good thing for startups and consumers alike. But Google should just be honest and say that they think everything should be open—except for search and advertising.

(Image via j/f/photos).

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Google Speed Tracer: Why Is That Web App So Sluggish?

We all notice when a web app is acting a big sluggish. What is causing it to be so slow?Why is it not responding as fast as it should?

These are the kinds of issues that keep developers up at night.

To help solve this problem, Google is launching Speed Tracer, a new tool for the Google Web Toolkit.

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Speed Tracer is a Google Chrome extension. it gives developers the ability to identify problems in their web apps using a “sluggishness graph,” that shows how the app is doing. If it is zero on the graph’s y-axis then the app is screaming. If the y-axis is 100 then something is wrong. It is acting sluggish.

Speed Tracer is one of several new features added to Google Web Toolkit.

For example, one of the new features in Google Web Toolkit splits code to help speed up the start time of large applications. According to Google, “Code Splitting enables developers to safely and easily slice and dice their application code so that key functionality can load immediately and other features can be loaded later as needed.”

These are the kinds of applications we should expect to see more of as web applications proliferate. We need more ways to do benchmarks. Services like Speed Tracer help diagnose issues to quickly improve performance. That’s a critical issue in today’s market. The speed of an application can be the difference for a customer. If the application is fast, they may stay and check things out. if it is slow they will split.

And when they split, who knows if they will ever come back.

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