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iHoot: Our iPhones expose a Camera Roll bug

Inexplicably, three of my friends and I ended up at the Fisherman's Wharf Hooters in San Francisco last week after we got our iPhones.

We actually went there for the food--no, really. We wanted buffalo wings, and where else to go but Hooters? Anyway, the usual siren-like charm of the waitresses went unnoticed by us. From my understanding of how it works at Hooters, usually the customers fawn over the waitresses, who are the objects of desire. Well, this day it was the complete opposite, since the ogled became the oglers as soon as we whipped out our objects … Read more

802.11n Draft 2.0 certification underway

Netgear announced today that two of its Draft 802.11n wireless products have been certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance as in compliance with draft 2.0 of the 802.11n spec. This certification ensures that the product in question is interoperable with products from other vendors, that it adheres to the latest security protection schemes, and that it's backward-compatible with previous generations of Wi-Fi equipment (such as 802.11g and 802.11b products). Netgear's RangeMax NEXT Wireless-N Router Gigabit Edition (WNR854T) and RangeMax NEXT Wireless-N Router (WNR834B) have both been certified as Draft 2.0-compliant. Users who have … Read more

BEA to deliver Web 2.0 apps for business in July

BEA Systems in July will ship a series of corporate search and collaboration products designed around Web technologies.

The three products--Aqualogic Pages, Aqualogic Pathways, Aqualogic Ensemble--will initially be aimed primarily at customers of BEA's portal products but the company expects them to have broader appeal. Each will be sold individually, said Ajay Gandhi, director of emerging products at BEA's Business Interaction Division.

The infrastructure software company showed off early versions of the products at its customer conference last year and originally divulged plans for the product line back in 2005.

The common theme of the three products is … Read more

Google acquires Zenter, online slideshow tool

Google has just announced its acquisition of Zenter, a small company that makes software for creating online slideshows--a much rumored, and fully confirmed product Google's CEO Eric Schmidt officially announced a few months ago at the Web 2.0 Expo.

Zenter joins Tonic Systems, another presentation-creation service Google picked up back in April.

Zenter first unveiled its service in mid-March and has since stayed fairly quiet. The service lets users import Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, as well as grab bits of content from all over the Web for making presentations that can be viewed and shared in the Web browser. … Read more

Microsoft does 'social computing' with SharePoint

BOSTON--When it comes to using Web 2.0 technologies in businesses, Microsoft is officially onboard.

Microsoft's general manager of SharePoint tools and platforms, Derek Burney, gave a talk at the Enterprise 2.0 conference here, where he announced a Web 2.0-style add-on called Community Kit for SharePoint.

Also, enterprise RSS vendor NewsGator announced that it has enhanced SharePoint's feed subscribing tools with tagging and an Ajax interface.

The notion of integrating Web 2.0 technologies from the public Internet--blogs, wikis, and social networking features--in businesses has been gaining momentum for the past few years and is … Read more

Making enterprise software more like the web

Yesterday was the second day of Alfresco's quarterly management meeting (and no, I don't like this one because there are no football matches during the summer, though I am going with Luis to see The Drowsy Chaperone tonight. During the meeting, we spent awhile talking through changes in enterprise software; or, rather, changes that should happen in enterprise software.

What's the biggest problem in enterprise software today? I mean, besides how expensive, complex, and clunky it is?

It doesn't work the way the world works.

What do I mean? I mean that despite the fact that, as John Donne might write, "no corporation is an island, entire unto itself," most enterprise software treats corporations (and their denizens) exactly as islands. Little pools of creativity who share within the walls of their own corporation, if at all (and generally not at all). … Read more

Web apps are key for wannabe iPhone developers

Steve Jobs's final "One Last Thing" announcement at the WWDC keynote today had to do with the iPhone. Instead of announcing a third-party developer kit like many thought he would, he encouraged the use of Web 2.0 and AJAX applications to be run entirely from the Safari browser (Which coincides nicely with the other announcement of a Windows version of Safari). Apple even demonstrated something called Apple Directory, a Safari Web application that lets you look up business contact cards. There's also a Google application that pulls up map and satellite imagery when a street … Read more

Video: Inside the Semantic Web with Sir Tim Berners-Lee

ZDNet's David Berlind got some time with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Topics covered include the Semantic Web (see also: Microformats), mashups, and the benefits of open standards versus proprietary development environments such as Flash and Silverlight.

"We wouldn't have had the Web," Berners-Lee says, had it started as bunch of competing solutions. And as the mobile Web gains momentum, with its closed access devices (mobile phones), we're in danger of a platform fragmentation that could put a damper on innovation. "We must keep an open interface platform. The … Read more

Developers rank Web platform providers

eBay gets the highest overall marks from developers as a Web platform provider followed by Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN, according to a new survey by Evans Data.

Amazon.com, which is trying to develop a large Web services business, scored near the bottom while Google gets good marks for its tools--even better than Microsoft.

Although simmering for a while, the idea of building Web applications on top of large-scale commercial sites like Yahoo or Google has picked up steam significantly in the past two years.

This is an important transition in the application development area--and the Internet overall. As … Read more

An equal-opportunity player for Web 2.0

There's the temptation to start talking about the Democracy Player with a Lord of the Rings-esque, "One Player to Rule Them All" joke, but that wouldn't be very democratic, would it?

The latest version of the open-source Democracy Player contains some serious upgrades that make it worth a second look, if you haven't liked it in the past. The most important improvement is that the publisher, the Participatory Culture Foundation, seems to have worked through most of program's early stability issues. After tooling around with the player for hours on Windows Vista, it neither crushed my system's memory usage nor crashed. Memory usage and stability have been major issues for the plucky little player, and I suspect they will continue to be. But at least it wasn't gathering piles of RAM like a YouTube-obsessed squirrel fearing the approaching winter.… Read more

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