• Scaling out like Technorati

    By John Newton | September 17, 2007, 10:12am PDT

    My fellow World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, David Sifry, the founder of Technorati, was also in Dalian, China for the “Meeting of New Champions” or “Summer Davos” as the Chinese like to call it. During Davos in January, I had the great misfortune of pitching Alfresco against Technorati in a competition between tech pioneer companies. [...]

  • Jimmy Wales and Enterprise Wikis

    By John Newton | September 14, 2007, 9:34am PDT

    At the Summer Davos in Dalian, China, I was able to speak to Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, about wikis in the enterprise. Wikipedia has become not only the world’s most popular wiki, but the ninth most popular web site in the world. Jimmy is here as a Young Global Leader with others that [...]

  • Summer Davos in Dalian China

    By John Newton | September 14, 2007, 9:31am PDT

    Last week I was in Dalian, China for the World Economic Forum Inaugural Meeting of the New Champions. That’s a mouthful, so the Chinese simply called it the “Summer Davos”. It makes sense as this feels very much like Davos only a bit smaller and slightly more relaxed and less intimidating. It is still difficult [...]

  • REST-style architecture in the real world

    By John Newton | July 10, 2007, 3:32am PDT

    A couple of weeks ago, I presented REST to the IT staff in the London division of a major US investment bank. Out of something like 100 people, only a small number of people had ever heard of REST. Yet this bank had invested in a REST to SOAP bridge to facilitate delivering product and [...]

  • Microsoft’s 4th of July Trans-Atlantic assault on document standards

    By John Newton | July 9, 2007, 5:58am PDT

    On what is normally a slow period for news, Microsoft launched a concerted campaign to displace ODF and PDF as document access and retention standards on both sides of the Atlantic. Microsoft has proposed and lobbied for OOXML as an alternative to ODF and XPS as an alternative to Adobe’s PDF. Having been burned by [...]

  • Is Relational Relevant?

    By John Newton | June 20, 2007, 11:09am PDT

    Last week, some friends of mine from Ingres, the early relational database management system, attended a retrospective on relational database systems held at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley with other database pioneers from Oracle, Informix, IBM and Sybase. I was an early employee at Ingres which was the second best selling relational database [...]

  • Microsoft needs REST

    By John Newton | June 19, 2007, 6:49am PDT

    Apparently, Microsoft is diverging from the rest of the Web 2.0 world on how to approach integration and mashups. REST (Representational State Transition) is an architectural style that is transforming how systems integrate together, but it isn’t a standard. The ATOM Publishing Protocol (APP) is a popular RESTful standard used by Google and Yahoo among [...]

  • McKinsey's look into Web 2.0 in the enterprise

    By John Newton | June 4, 2007, 1:54pm PDT

    The collection of techniques and technologies known as Web 2.0 is really only just beginning to have an affect on the enterprise. We are in that phase of market development where in Web 1.0 enterprises just started to realize that the internet is the new brochureware. Enterprises are starting to say, “We want a conversation [...]

  • The opening of Web 2.0 service platforms

    By John Newton | June 4, 2007, 1:40pm PDT

    Last week I was in San Francisco bay area talking to several Web 2.0 companies about their APIs. Much has been written about Facebook’s new move to open up their platform to encourage others to help it evolve new services and I wanted to find out what services from Web 2.0 platforms are available. Using [...]

  • REST Battles SOAP for the Future of Information Services

    By John Newton | May 25, 2007, 8:20am PDT

    There has been some subterranean discussion in the content management standards arena about what is the best way to support the interoperability of content services with applications. Should vendors support content services through the myriad of web services support layers that have been developed over the last decade? Or should we take a leap into [...]