Saturday, February 20, 2010

Blackberry to Get a Better Browser.. Finally!

Finally I must say... I am a big Blackberry fan. Emails are really my thing and nothing better than a Blackberry. But there are many times when I want to surf something from that link in the email and it does not work well. Some bad layout, bad javaScript... it sucks! Thankfully now there is some movement to integrate the WebKit engine into the Blackberry browser. Watch this keynote from Mobile World Congress '10:

Blackberry had last year bought Iris browser (a Webkit based mobile browser) company called Torch Mobile... and I was waiting when they would use that asset. Now it seems it will come. How difficult is it to ship a product that you just bought??

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Google Buzz: Google's Twitter

Google today comes with another competition, for another web company. It's called Google Buzz and it's a microblogging tool for short conversations/photos/videos/feeds. Its is integrated and publishes to all you contacts from Gmail. It can be used from Gmail and hence very simple to use...

The most interesting part to me is how it's integrated with all the other Google services like Picasa, Maps, Youtube. It is even linked to Twitter if you want to. Google Buzz can let you share your stuff with the world through public conversations or with a group of friends. Very interesting is how it provides recommendations and I expect the recommendations are going to be great because it comes from Google. Google is someone who knows more about u do that you yourself do!

Watch the video that introduces us to Buzzzz:

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

The first axe on Sun after Oracle acquisition

Although the hardware business and the way of working at Sun Microsystems would continue as outlined in a detailed 5hr marathon by Oracle Boss Larry Ellison, we have the first victim of the merger... and its the not-so-successful "Kenai" project hosting services from Sun Microsystems. According to the announcement, "It's with a sad heart that we have to announce that the Kenai.com domain will be shutdown as part of the consolidation of project hosting sites now that Sun is a wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle."

Kenai.com was never a good launch... Not a lot of marketing, nor a lot of support or projects jumped into their bandwagon. But it was kind of a nice set of features that Kenai.com was providing. It had source-code hosting with version control where you could choose between Subversion, Mercurial or Git. Issue tracking you could choose between JIRA and Bugzilla. It also provided you with mailing lists, wiki, forums, downloads, chat room etc. Basically covering most of the part of the web infrastructure that today open-source projects want. Nothing innovative or original, you get all of those at other places and probably somewhat better packaged, but Kenai definitely gave a lot of choices.

The announcement also mentions:
Project Kenai has always existed as two different things: Kenai the infrastructure, and Kenai the website (Kenai.com).  While it has come time to close the domain of Kenai.com, the infrastructure (which is already used under NetBeans.org) will live on to support other domains in the future.

So, you see the real added advantage for using Kenai was for developers and projects using Netbeans 6.8 because it was very nicely integrated. You could manage issues, code, forums etc from inside Netbeans. Nevertheless, its the death of one of the failed products of Sun Microsystems. This may just be the beginning where we see many axes chopping failed projects. Hopefully none of the huge, monolith trees get chopped, only because they aren't fetching money!