Web Development Live

Announced it is helping to prepare the next generation of business and IT experts at no charge with online resources designed to educate students about hot technologies. Six offerings are now available, providing students access to tutorials, forums, games and other resources, and helping them develop marketable skills in hot job areas such as enterprise computing, Web 2.0 programming and database management.

Additionally, through the Student Portal on the IBM Academic Initiative web site, students can access a three-step tutorial on Service Science Management and Engineering (SSME), a new academic discipline that brings together ongoing work in the fields of science, engineering, and business management, combined with the study of social and legal sciences. The SSME resources prepare students to take advantage of a growing field of “hybrid” technology jobs that require multi-disciplinary backgrounds, such as environmental engineering, information analysis and urban architect planning.

Companies today are increasingly going global and looking for employees that offer deep technical knowledge and a broad understanding of business dynamics to help them expand into new markets. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that more than 4.6 million jobs will be created in the services sector between 2004 and 2014, and IT will continue to be one of the fastest growing sectors. In addition, new global employment opportunities are expected to emerge based on the demand for integrated business and technology skills.

Universities such as Brandeis in Waltham, Massachusetts have focused their efforts to help students use open standards technologies to address real world challenges such as resource planning and carbon output. One tool used at Brandeis is Innov8, an educational video game developed by IBM that teaches students to apply technologies and business strategies to make companies more efficient and increase customer satisfaction. More than 100 colleges and universities have already incorporated the game into their curricula and thousands more can download the game from the IBM Academic Initiative website at no charge.

“Our relationship with IBM is critical to bridging the gap between IT and business skills,” said Preeta Banerjee, Assistant Professor of Strategy at Brandeis International Business School. “Through the IBM Academic Initiative, we are able to harness valuable resources in the classroom, such as Innov8, a video game that is representative of what a career at IBM might entail.”

“Colleges and universities worldwide are being challenged to develop a curriculum that offers students a practical combination of business and technical skills to meet industry demands,” said Kevin Faughnan, Director of IBM’s Academic Initiative. “This is why we’re making available the largest collection of learning resources specifically on the key skill areas our customers are looking for. We anticipate that thousands of students this year alone will take the opportunity to become technically proficient on leading-edge technologies and increase their skills portfolio.”

IBM customer MIB is moving toward a Services-Oriented Architecture extended with Web 2.0 to better serve its 500 member life and health insurance companies. Therefore, it is looking to attract emerging talent in Massachusetts who can continue development of Web 2.0 capabilities and Rich Internet Applications to assure secure data exchanges.

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Brigham Young famously wanted streets wide enough to turn a team of horses and wagon in, and the superblocks were designed to be neatly divided into plots that would give the settlers enough land to grow crops, have an orchard and sustain themselves.

Few wagon trains are pulling U-turns in downtown Salt Lake these days, and the office buildings and parking lots don’t leave much room for fruit trees. And even the most meticulously planned community loses its luster over time and needs some modernizing especially if the alternative for new investment is not unsettled wilderness but the growing suburbs and towns strung along the Wasatch front.

So Salt Lake is embarking on a major redevelopment effort under an umbrella plan called Downtown Rising in which nearly $2 billion will be invested in new offices, residential and retail buildings, arts, culture and governmental facilities and transit projects.

There’s a Seattle component to this. Seattle-based architecture firm Callison is a participant in one of downtown Salt Lake’s biggest projects, City Creek, a 20-acre mixed-use project across the street from Temple Square.

Seattle-based retailer Nordstrom was one of the drivers behind the redevelopment effort generally and City Creek in particular.

“Frankly, the heart of downtown has for the last 20 years been slipping into a worse state of repair,” says Callison principal Stan Laegreid. “It was turning into quite a liability. Everyone agreed something needed to be done.” As a downtown tenant with a lease nearing its end, Nordstrom was “watching the value of a downtown and a commercial market just steadily slip away.” The retailer was reluctant to stay unless “there was a larger commitment to turn downtown around.”

Beyond those specifics, Salt Lake’s efforts to rejuvenate its downtown have some interesting parallels and contrasts for Seattle as it considers its own redevelopment efforts in places such as South Lake Union, south downtown and Sodo.

Salt Lake and Seattle are hardly alone among western U.S. cities considering large-scale redevelopments that involve millions of dollars in investment and years of planning and wrangling. Some cities get a blank canvas to work with in the form of abandoned rail yards that cover acres of potentially prime developable real estate. Sacramento, Calif.; Santa Fe, N.M.; and Spokane are in varying stages of rail-yard redevelopment projects. Renton is working with former Boeing property near Lake Washington. Yakima is looking at what it can do with a former sawmill.

Salt Lake differs somewhat in that it’s trying to work a somewhat coordinated plan into and around an existing downtown, although Laegreid says there’s actually considerable open property in the downtown core.

But the biggest difference between Salt Lake and Seattle is the influence and participation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Temple Square is at the physical heart of downtown, drawing visitors as both a religious center and tourist destination.

“They have deliberately spearheaded this effort,” Laegreid says. “That introduces a dynamic and a patronage in the process that very few cities have. That was a big trigger in allowing this to happen.”

Contrast that with development efforts in Seattle. One striking feature about Downtown Rising is the breadth of business sector and governmental participation in a shared plan for downtown. With Seattle’s fractious political scene, very little gets done in a coordinated fashion unless, of course, a private developer such as Paul Allen’s Vulcan in South Lake Union has the size and drive to come up with a large-scale redevelopment plan on its own and push it to reality.

Not that having such an influential partner meant immediate unanimity in Salt Lake. “There still were a lot of vested parties that collectively had to share a vision,” Laegreid says. Once the first ideas were floated, human nature took over. “Everyone’s got opinions,” he says. “There was a certain amount of compromising, everyone getting their voices heard.” Although Salt Lake isn’t as consensus-crazy as Seattle, “given the high profile of the project, it started to feel much more like a Seattle” process.

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Website Pros has released NetObjects Fusion 11, an enhanced version of the Web site design application .

In addition to an intuitive drag-&-drop functionality that the company says makes NetObjects Fusion 11 a fast, easy way to plan, build and manage Web sites, along with its standard e-Commerce capabilities, NetObjects Fusion 11 includes more advanced functionality for those looking for more technical development options.

The code generation engine of NetObjects Fusion 11 has been completely re-engineered to support the generation of Semantic XHTML code, allowing a tighter utilisation of CSS that Webiste Pros says produces leaner code, making it more accessible and search engine friendly.

Users can integrate data into Web pages from any local or remote XML data source, such as an RSS feed. NetObjects Fusion 11 automatically identifies the XML structure allowing drag & drop insertion of data fields directly into the page design.

Featuring a collection of AJAX Widgets, NetObjects Fusion 11 eliminates the complexity of designing Web 2.0 pages with dynamic user interactions by making it easy to quickly add customisable page elements, such as accordions, tabbed panels and toggle panes to make dynamic web pages that provide a richer, more interactive experience for Web site visitors.

Sophisticated animation of any Web site content, such as video, text, images and graphics, can now be easily created from within the drag-&-drop editing environment of NetObjects Fusion without coding or the purchase of additional software.

The database functionality implemented in NetObjects Fusion 11 fully supports the creation of data-driven, highly interactive Web sites turning NetObjects Fusion 11 into a Web Application Development System with broad appeal to enterprise Web developers. NetObjects Fusion 11 now supports all commercially relevant databases, Web servers and server-and-client side technologies and ships with support for PHP.

NetObjects Fusion 11 provides a suite of components that add advanced functionality to any Web site design. Flash Photo Galleries, Flash Calendars, Flash Web Charts, Password Protection, Guestbook, Google Analytics, SiteMaps and many other components are pre-built and easily integrated into any website.

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Domains in Hong Kong, China and the Philippines have been named as the most potentially dangerous on the web.

A recent report by security firm McAfee found that the three nations had the highest percentage of malicious sites within their domain suffixes.

Researchers estimated that roughly 19 per cent of all sites ending with the .hk suffix posed some sort of security threat. Second place was China’s .cn with 11 per cent posing a security risk.

“Just like the real world, the virtual threats and risks are constantly changing,” said Jeff Green, senior vice president of product development at McAfee.

“As our research shows, sites that are safe today can be dangerous tomorrow. Surfing the web based on conventional wisdom is not enough to avoid risks.”

The .com domain, the most popular on the internet, was ninth riskiest overall, while .gov was the safest among the generic domains.

Finland’s .fi was ranked as the safest on the internet, with .05 per cent of sites posing a possible threat. Japan’s .jp and Norway’s .no rounded out the list of the three safest domains.

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Hoping to give a marketing boost to nonprofit agencies that build and rehabilitate housing, the city of Columbus and a national nonprofit have created a one-stop shop Web site designed to market inner-city homes to current and potential Columbus residents.

The city is partnering with Enterprise Community Partners, a national community development agency based in Columbia, Md., to run the site. Enterprise has a 20-year history in Columbus, at one time running the Columbus Housing Partnership, a nonprofit agency that builds and rehabs inner-city homes, said Phillip Downing, director of the Enterprise office in Columbus.

Now Enterprise wants to help nonprofits that may be good at building and rehabbing, but not so good at marketing and sales.

Homes featured on the site are primarily in south, west and east Columbus neighborhoods around Nationwide Children’s Hospital, Franklinton, Hilltop and the King-Lincoln Arts district. Enterprise is placing homes from nonprofit agencies such as the Columbus Housing Partnership, MiraCit, the Greater Linden Development Corp. and others on the Web site.

Enterprise and the city also partnered with Dublin-based Coldwell Banker King Thompson and Gahanna-based World Financial Network National Bank to provide real estate and banking services to potential buyers.

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Sitting on the porch at Finca Torrenova, his 800-acre retreat on this Mediterranean island, Martin Varsavsky ticks off the credentials of the group of Internet entrepreneurs finishing lunch at a nearby table.

“He has 40 million uniques, he has 50 million, and he has 8 million,” Varsavsky says, referring to the number of visitors to Web sites owned by his guests many of whom are also business associates and have joined him for several days of brainstorming about the digital future.

These days, commercial victory on the Internet is all about scale, and Varsavsky, a 48-year-old from Argentina, can be forgiven for speaking longingly and in detail about his peers’ achievements. No stranger to success — he has had a tidy crop of new media and telecommunications hits since the 1990s he is still struggling to bring his newest Internet venture to fruition.

Three years ago, aiming to create a global wireless network, he founded FON, a company based in Madrid that wants to unlock the potential power of the social Internet. FON’s gamble is that Internet users will share a portion of their wireless connection with strangers in exchange for access to wireless hotspots controlled by others.

The two camps, known as WiMax and LTE, for “long-term evolution,” are both top-down, highly structured approaches that will cost billions of dollars to build and may close a door on some of the architectural openness that led to the rapid growth of the Internet.

But their potential advantage is that closed standards can encourage the kind of growth that offers more access to mainstream consumers and business users, as occurred when Microsoft imposed a measure of conformity on software development.

For his part, Varsavsky hopes that FON can offer a middle ground deploying the original, bottom-up strengths of the early Internet movement and at the same time wedding them to a more formal, corporate approach to expansion.

Although FON faces huge obstacles in realizing those ambitions, the company also has a growing number of devotees.

“The wireless Internet market today is fragmented and complex it can be accessed through 3G operators, through WiMax, through private hotspots, through paid hotspots and through corporate networks,” said Michael Jackson, a partner at Mangrove Capital in London and a former FON board member. “In summary, it is a nightmare for a consumer. FON can and will change this.”

Undeterred, Varsavsky says that what he currently lacks in scale he can make up for in huge cost savings, particularly because FON avoids the expensive proposition of having to build a worldwide network of cellular towers and Wi-Fi nodes from scratch.

“Our army of Foneros is a much more efficient way of distributing a signal,” he says. “We believe WiMax operators will be happy to have some customers use their services for free and save billions in infrastructure deployment.”

Varsavsky has worked overtime trying to line up more high-profile partners for FON. To that end, he traveled to Cupertino, California, last fall to meet with Steve Jobs, the chief executive of Apple.

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The report, “Broadband Internet Use in Rural Pennsylvania,” examines broadband availability and adoption in four sectors health care, local government, education and business through case studies, interviews with key information-technology personnel and analysis of organizations’ Web sites. While the report focuses on Pennsylvania, their recommendations hold true for any state with a large rural population, according to the researchers.

“Broadband services offer a huge opportunity for rural areas with significant payback in terms of economic development and community revitalization,” said Amy Glasmeier, professor of geography and co-author of the report. “The Internet makes possible a whole range of processes which involve more than rapid access to information and which range from joint projects by municipalities and collaborations between schools to development of new business processes.”

According to the researchers, while the number of rural users of broadband Internet services has been steadily increasing, access to broadband is not universal in rural areas, and in some places, dial-up remains the only affordable option. While dial-up allows for electronic access to information, its slower speed and lower bandwidth capacity limit organizations from developing Internet-enabled processes and collaborations what the researchers distinguish as “transformative” uses.

For instance, with broadband Internet, rural hospitals could improve patient care by forging networks with urban hospitals to access their expertise and resources. Rural hospitals also could develop interactive processes such as online appointment scheduling, remote patient monitoring through biosignals and image data and videoconferencing between patients and doctors.

“Policy must consider ways to facilitate broadband deployment to do more than the status quo only slightly faster or with less face-to-face contact,” Glasmeier said.

But policy makers also need to recognize that there is no single solution to the challenges of broadband utilization. Programs need to be specific to their sectors and linked to the specific challenges facing individual sectors, the researchers assert.

Some interactive processes such as streaming of public meetings, tax payments, conversation forums and collaborative software for curriculum development which broadband Internet can facilitate for local governments and school districts are less relevant for businesses and hospitals, for instance.

The report’s co-authors are Chris Benner, associate professor at University of California-Davis; Chandrani Ohdedar, Ph.D. student, Penn State department of geography; and Lee Carpenter of the Penn State Children, Youth and Families Consortium.

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The Bush administration has added a controversial ingredient to the $770-million aid package it recently proposed to ease the world food crisis: language that would promote the use of genetically modified crops in food-deprived countries.

The value or detriment of genetically modified, or bioengineered, food is an intensely disputed issue in the U.S. and in Europe, where many countries have banned foods made from genetically modified organisms.

Proponents say that genetically modified crops can result in higher yields from plants that are hardier in harsh climates.

“We certainly think that it is established fact that a number of bioengineered crops have shown themselves to increase yields through their drought resistance and pest resistance,” said Dan Price, a food aid expert on the National Security Council.

Opponents of such crops allege that they can cause allergies, illnesses and unforeseen medical problems in those who consume them.

They also contend that the administration’s plan is aimed at helping American agribusinesses such as Monsanto, which manufactures genetically modified varieties of seed.

“This is a hot topic now with the food crisis,” said Ronnie Cummins, national director of the Organic Consumers Assn. “I think it’s pretty obvious at this point that genetically engineered crops — they may do a number of things, but they don’t increase yields. There are no commercialized crops that are designed to deal with the climate crisis.”

Bush proposed the food package two weeks ago as aid groups and the U.N. World Food Program pressed Western governments to provide additional funds to bridge the gap caused by rising food prices.

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Innovative, user friendly and one of leading turnkey ecommerce solution provider has announced its latest release that incorporates the added value and benefits of web portal into its largely popular ecommerce web application, eBanyan.

Coupled with eBbanyan’s rich featured ecommerce platform, the portal will allow websites to combine feature-packed solution into a single point of entry for a better users’ experience. Backed by eBanyan’s superior architecture, the web portal is aimed at delivering performance and ease of use, along with a liberty to offer sophisticated Web 2.0 features effortlessly in a programming-free environment.

With bundled features, eBanyan’s web portal is available in range of templates, programming free customization in look and feel and scalability to meet business’s increasing demands.

Commenting on the latest release, Abid Malik, President and CEO of eBanyan said that eBanyan has always made available the most recent technologies for our customers. “eBanyan, offers myriad of must have features for online businesses, which not only enables them to smoothly reap the productivity but also make it possible to embarrass innovating new opportunities coming across.”

eBanyan offers its customers with wide range of features including dynamic online catalog to outfit almost any cataloging requirement, shopping cart, real time pricing, local search for products and services, automated shipping and handling, unlimited product grouping, order tracking, e-mail campaigns, project and task manager, immediate online payment processing, search engine optimization, secure access, import/export, customizable forms and reports, customer relation, outstanding support and so many others to provide its customers’ with ultimate online business solution.

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“One thing stood out,” Singh said. “There was no easy way to do file systems.” So Singh decided to create one, even though he worked for Google’s search team at the time and wasn’t part of the company’s Mac development efforts.

The reaction of his bosses to this use of company time? Go for it.

Singh’s project, which became the open-source file-system utility MacFUSE, is just one of the many employee-driven efforts that go on within the walls of the search-engine and text-advertising giant all the time.

Google calls it “20-percent time,” encouraging its engineers to pursue other Google-related interests for up to 20 percent of their work hours—even if that interest has little to do with their regular duties at the search and software company.

Efforts such as 20-percent projects by engineers like Singh are par for the course at Google, a company that sees encouraging employees to pursue subjects they find interesting as a critical part of its own development goals.

“A lot of things that happen at Google are based on empowering people to come up with ideas and pursue them if [those ideas are] good,” said Sundar Pichai, Google’s director of product management.

Many 20-percent projects have wound up becoming major Google products: both Google News and Gmail, for instance, started that way. Among the Mac-specific efforts that began as 20-percent projects are Notifier, which offers Gmail and Google Calendar notifications, and the Google Mac Developer Playground, an online collection of open-source Mac projects created at Google.

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