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4/30/2008
Sprout's Widget Tools
Sprout launched a new software development kit (SDK) at the show. The company is a provider of an online platform for creating, publishing and managing Flash content on the Web. The platform enables the creation of "Sprouts," which are widgets, mini-sites, banners, mashups and other forms of rich media content. The SDK is designed to provide developers with a range of property types and editors for manipulating and customizing components.
Backbase's Web Apps
Backbase announced at the show its Customer Engagement 2.0 product, a suite of AJAX-based rich applications designed "to ease and expand customer relationships," according to company literature. The Rich Dashboard application unifies content and functionality in a single personalized start page. Rich Forms lets users create online forms. A Co-browse & Chat feature can be used to increase conversion rates through collaborative browsing.
Symphoniq's End User Monitoring
Symphoniq released the 2.0 version of its TrueView user monitoring solution for RIAs, a tool for customer Web application management. It relies on Symphoniq's TRUE technology to provide visibility into a range of Web apps, including AJAX, Flash/Flex and Silverlight, to monitor how usage and performance are affecting the end user.
Socialtext's Enterprise-Grade Wikis
Socialtext showed its enterprise-oriented Socialtext Dashboard and Socialtext People solutions at the Web 2.0 event. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company makes wiki-based social solutions for businesses. Its namesake products, currently in beta, are expected to become commercially available later this quarter.
Kapow's Mashable Data
Kapow Technologies, an enterprise mashup provider, rolled out its new OnDemand Service at the show. Kapow falls into a category that Gartner calls "Mashup Enabler," which defines products that provide data that is "mashable." OnDemand is a Web-based hosted service designed to enable an automated, high-volume collection of Web intelligence and market data "to help companies make more informed business decisions, sooner," according to company literature. The service is aimed at financial and business analysts who need to incorporate Web-based data into their business analysis on a real-time basis.
Collaboration Driving Business Web 2.0
The enterprise aspect of Web 2.0 technologies is getting emphasized partly because of a growing need of companies to integrate geographically dispersed teams while operating complex business processes, according to researchers at The Butler Group. Organizations are reexamining their corporate communication and collaboration strategies to better support business activities and objectives with key Web 2.0 technologies in mind, according to "Communications and Collaboration Report -- Laying the Foundations for Business Process Flexibility," which was recently published by the analyst firm.
In May in San Francisco, experts from leading universities, libraries, and research institutions around the world met as part of an ongoing effort to address a pressing issue: archiving the world's history, right up to today.
The Quilt, a coalition of 28 regional network organizations, has added XO Communications Services to its authorized vendor list. The Quilt represents 200 universities and thousands of other educational institutions across the United States. With this new relationship, Quilt members can purchase XO's high-speed IP transit and network transport services at competitive rates.
At the NECC 2008 conference in Texas this week, Wimba launched a new version of Wimba Classroom, the virtual classroom component of the company's Collaboration Suite. The new 5.2 release expands options for classroom capture and adds a variety of other functional and ease of use features.
The lure of automating workflow online so human intervention is minimized is continually reinforced in the minds of higher education administrators by examples of automated campus systems such as financials, student information systems, and other enterprise systems. But what's good for management is not always good for learning.
Cognos, which IBM acquired in January, has released an update to its business intelligence software that will run on the Linux operating system on IBM System z mainframes. IBM Cognos 8 BI was being developed by the two companies prior to the acquisition, but assimilation of Cognos into IBM accelerated development.
Facebook is a way to greet a colleague as if she or he is on your own campus: a wave at a distance, a hello at the corner burrito place, a honk as you both leave the campus parking lot. Informal collegiality has been extended over the miles.