Web Development Live

Openbravo, the leading developer of web-based open source Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Point-of-Sale (PoS) solutions, has announced today the launch of its updated open source web-based ERP software, Openbravo ERP 2.40.

With the release of Openbravo’s beta version of ERP 2.40, which is available for download from SourceForge.net, Openbravo continues its innovations in user experience. Openbravo ERP 2.40 has updated the product with numerous enhancements focused on two distinct key areas that users care about most: increased user productivity and improved global functionality.

The new release also includes several additional improvements in other areas. The functional scope has been broadened with an enhanced projects and services module, with newly introduced features such as a historical salary category, goods receipt by PO number and purchase requisitions support. Reports have been revamped, including a new payment ageing balancing, budget and Pareto reports with a broadened payments report for more than one business partner at a time. Infrastructure has been upgraded with significantly revised security and more control over user roles, audit to review who created and updated each transaction, additional web services, and better reporting back to Openbravo to help the development process and PostgreSQL 8.3 support.

“The release of Openbravo ERP 2.40 is the product of generous effort from our community to simplify enterprise resource planning,” said Paolo Juvara, Chief Products Officer of Openbravo. “With all the enhancements contained in this update, the fundamental advantage to 2.40 is that it simply makes the end user’s business run more efficiently and effectively. It is with great support and feedback from our community that we have made our best web-based ERP system to date.”

To learn more about Openbravo products and services visit the Openbravo website, and to download and install Openbravo ERP 2.40 beta visit the download page. Openbravo Network 2.40, the commercial subscription service Openbravo offers to clients looking for professional support for a complete solution, is expected to be released in September.

Queensland integrator, Ordyss, has acquired boutique web development company, Logisto, and bolstered its management team and staff numbers.

Managing director, Keith Lavelle, said the acquisition of Logisto offered another business line for Ordyss to take to the market. Logisto develops its own content management system, which allows them to reach deeply into an organisations content system using both internal and external web technology.

Lavelle said the new management appointments were made on the back of winning a major facilities maintenance contract with Gallagher Bassett Services and experiencing strong growth on the services side of the business. Ordyss assumed responsibility for all of Gallagher’s IT&T services including hardware and software procurement, desktop management, helpdesk, project delivery and services.

Jones will be responsible for the professional services arm of the business, which encompasses its software development and facilities management arm. He previously ran his own freelance consultancy company before joining Ordyss.

Hutchinson will look after the managed services business that entails its outsourced helpdesk and network monitoring function. He was previously the CIO of the Coffee Club. Prior to joining the integrator, Mair worked at venture capitol company, Pioneer Development Fund. Salvo has previously worked for Assured IT.

The Economic Development Committee is looking to go high-tech in its quest to attract new businesses to town.

The committee last night met with Louis Gudema, president of Magic Hour Communications, to discuss creating an economic development Web site that Community Planning and Economic Development Director Steve Costello said would be separate from, but linked to, the town’s Web site.

Costello said the committee has already met with another Web site developer to gather as much information as possible before making a recommendation to selectmen.

The site would allow prospective business owners access to a wealth of information about the town and hopefully attract them to Norwood.

“Web sites, beyond any doubt, today are the most important form of communication there is,” said Gudema.

He said his business offers a three-pronged approach. First is to develop an overall strategy and decide what information the committee wants to convey.

The second is the actual design of the site and determining what information should be prominently displayed. The final step is developing technological aspects of the site, including Internet search engine optimization.

Committee member Jeanne Babel said Norwood would promote the town’s low commercial tax base as an incentive for businesses to locate in town.

“The site has to communicate not only what Norwood is today, but what you want it to become,” Gudema said.

Costello said that amount is generally what he is looking to budget for the enterprise. He said there is enough money in the Economic Development Fund to pay for the service if the committee and selectmen approve.

The Economic Development Committee was formed in 2002 as an advisory group to the Board of Selectmen charged with trying to expand the commercial tax base in town.

Costello said his plan is to ask selectmen for permission to develop a Web site and put out a request for bids possibly in the early fall.

The future of application development might be becoming a little more social. Sun certainly hopes so, and has launched zembly, a new collaboration platform for writing small, and lightweight web applications. It’s a promising start, squarely aimed at small, long-tail developers, and a new approach to collaborative development over the web. Challenges remain, such as the long-term reliability of third-party application hosting and the findability of small long-tail applications on large platforms.
 
I was able to demo zembly, which attempts to lower the barrier of entry to writing applications for social platforms such as Facebook, Meebo, OpenSocial and the iPhone by sharing services and widgets and came away impressed with its focus on ease of use and belief in a new development process.  zembly is working to create a social setting for developers to share components between applications a “wiki for live, editable code that is more than just about trivial widgets, but rather about full-fledged social applications that can tap into the social graph and reach millions of users”.
 
Applications are written in javascript, rely on a widget / web service development model, and have an extensive architecture for securely managing developer credentials so that you can share outbound service calls without sharing your credentials.  These widgets and services can be shared, or cloned (forked) from other developers and carry a full change log with them, so you can freeze your dependencies to a given version.  The system makes source control and component sharing simpler for the uninitiated than tools like Git and Subversion that can be difficult to learn.
 
zembly hopes that network effects will kick in, as the service will be most successful if users trust others on the system, and share components freely - something that has been hard to accomplish even in large corporate development teams.  If successful, it will be this feature that distinguishes zembly from Google App Engine and other competitors.

Despite these concerns, as someone who sometimes needs a little peer pressure and social support to get started on development projects, I’ll be following zembly as they build out their community-oriented features and work to deliver on their promise to wiki-fy web development, and I’ll be looking forward to sharing code with friends online.

Salesforce.com today introduced the summer upgrade to its on-demand CRM software, called Salesforce Summer ‘08, featuring enhancements on both the client and server-sides of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform.

Force.com, the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that allows developers to build their own applications to run along side the ones provided by Salesforce, has been expanded out to allow for developing any kind of application the users want with Apex, Salesforce’s Java-like programming language.

Also, Visualforce is now live in every edition of Salesforce, enabling developers to create their own custom interfaces based on Web 2.0 UI items that will work on any device. So it’s possible to make your Force.com applications run on a PC, laptop, BlackBerry or iPhone.

“Visualforce really completed the whole stack for how developers can use Force.com to create applications,” Al Falcion, senior director of product marketing for Salesforce, told InternetNews.com.

“Any client with a browser is covered. There’s definitely a need for different UIs, even if they use the same app.” As such, Visualforce lets developers create an application that presents data one way on a desktop, and in a different way on a notebook or smartphone.

One of the knocks on Web 2.0 is the performance of Ajax, which requires a lot of JavaScript to run on the client. “The key is having the right frequency of refreshes so they don’t drag the client down,” said Falcione.

The browser, that porthole onto the broad horizon of the Web, is about to get some fancy new window dressing.

Next month, after three years of development and six months of public testing, Mozilla, the insurgent browser developer that rose from the ashes of Netscape, will release Firefox 3.0. It will feature a few tricks that could change the way people organize and find the sites they visit most frequently.

Not to be outdone, Microsoft recently took the wraps off the first public test version of the latest edition of Internet Explorer, which is used by about 75 percent of all computer owners, according to Net Applications, a market share tracking firm. The finished version of Internet Explorer 8 could be released by the end of the year and is expected to have additional features.

Even Apple, which once politely kept its Safari browser within the confines of its own devices, is making a somewhat controversial push to get it onto the computers of people who use Windows PCs.

In other words, the browser war the skirmish that landed Microsoft in antitrust trouble in the ’90s is heating up again.

“The typical browser for today’s consumer doesn’t look all that different than it did 10 years ago,” said Larry Cheng, a partner at Fidelity Ventures, one of the firms that invested in Flock, a browser start-up. “That is an unsustainable trend that is the launching point for the second browser war, which will not be won by monopolistic muscle but by innovation.”

America Online, which acquired Netscape, spun off the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation in 2003. Its Firefox browser soon inspired an open-source movement backed by computer enthusiasts. Early versions of Firefox introduced features like a built-in pop-up blocker to kill ads, and tabbed browsing, which lets users toggle between Web windows.

Firefox now has 170 million users around the world and an 18 percent share of the browser market, according to Net Applications. That is especially impressive given that most of its users have made the active choice to download the software, while Internet Explorer is installed on most PCs at the factory.

In addition to giving Microsoft a kick in its competitive pants, Firefox has also reinforced for the high-tech industry the financial and strategic value of the browser. In 2004, Google struck a deal with Mozilla to include a Google search box tucked into a corner of the Firefox browser. According to Mozilla’s most recent tax documents, in 2006 Google paid Mozilla $65 million for the resulting traffic to its search listings.

“People in the industry foresee a time in which for many people, the only thing they’ll need on a computer is a browser,” said Mitch Kapor, the software pioneer who now sits on the board of the Mozilla Foundation and has created a start-up, FoxMarks, that is developing a tool to synchronize bookmarks between computers. “The browser is just extraordinarily strategic.”

That notion has helped to rekindle the browser wars and has resulted in the latest wave of innovation. Firefox 3.0, for example, runs more than twice as fast as the previous version while using less memory, Mozilla says.

The browser is also smarter and maintains three months of a user’s browsing history to try to predict what site he or she may want to visit. Typing the word “football” into the browser, for example, quickly generates a list of all the sites visited with “football” in the name or description.

Firefox has named this new tool the “awesome bar” and says it could replace the need for people to maintain long and messy lists of bookmarks. It will also personalize the browser for an individual user.

“Sitting at somebody else’s computer and using their browser is going to become a very awkward experience,” said Mitchell Baker, chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation.

Internet Explorer 8, from Microsoft, promises its own set of tricks. One new tool, Web slices, allows a user to bookmark a dynamic piece of a Web site, like an online auction or a sports score, and save it in the margin of the browser, where the user can watch as it changes.

Another new feature, called activities, allows users to highlight text on a page, click on it, then instantly send it to another site, like a mapping, e-mail or blogging service.

Asked whether Firefox’s increasing popularity had motivated these and other improvements, Mr. Hachamovitch of Microsoft said only, “We love to compete.” But he did say that amid the new competitive pressures, “the quality and quantity of my team has gone up significantly.”

His group will have one other company besides Mozilla to keep its eye on: Apple’s Safari Web browser has a little over 5 percent of the market, according to Net Applications, and subsists mostly on the loyalty of devoted Mac and iPhone owners.

But in March, deploying the kind of strategic jujitsu more commonly associated with Microsoft in the past, Apple began using the automatic update software that is packaged with its iTunes music player to deliver Safari onto the computers of people who use Windows. (Users had to specifically decline the Safari offer if they didn’t want the browser to be downloaded to their computers.)

The tactic irked even Apple fans in the blogosphere, along with Apple’s browser rivals. But it was at least partly successful: Net Applications reported that Apple’s market share on Windows computers had tripled since March.

In a statement released last month addressing the comments about the maneuver, Apple said it had made it easier for customers to distinguish minor updates from new programs delivered through the update software.

Apple’s boldness underscores the new importance of the Web browser in a world that is increasingly shifting online.

Shawn Hardin, chief executive of Flock, which is developing a browser that helps users share photos, videos and blog entries more easily, said consumers would ultimately benefit from the new browser battle.

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.

Scales, 52, has served as iCrossing’s president and chief operating for two years. He joined the company in 2006 as COO, adding title of president two months later. Herzog, who founded iCrossing 10 years ago, will remain on the company’s board of directors, serving as vice chairman.

The move marks a changing of the guard at iCrossing, which in a decade has grown from a small Scottsdale, Ariz., search shop to a 620-person digital agency. The company has fueled much of its growth through an aggressive acquisition strategy over the past two years. It has bought five companies, expanding its services from its search optimization roots into search advertising, analytics and Web development.

Scales has led the company’s efforts to integrate the acquired companies into a cohesive organization since. After acquiring Web development shop Proxicom in July 2007, iCrossing adopted that firm’s national service model, replacing a regional delivery model. It has also rebranded the shops it acquired under the iCrossing name and is working to bundle services to clients. ICrossing boasts 40 clients in the Fortune 500.

Richard Rosenblatt, chairman of iCrossing, said the move represents a natural progression for Scales since he has proven his merit in the past two years, during which he assumed day-to-day management of the firm. The next step for the agency: a public offering.

“This is a company that goes public in a couple of years,” Rosenblatt said, noting market conditions and the company’s evolution and growth would determine the exact timing.

Prior to joining iCrossing, Scales held executive roles at Omnicom Group’s Agency.com for three years, including two as CEO. He resigned in 2006 following a dispute with Omnicom management over aligning Agency.com with TBWA Worldwide. He has since brought over several Agency.com executives, including chief strategy officer Adam Lavelle, chief financial officer Mike Jackson and evp of operations Dave Johnson.

In December, Dana Neil Oaklund, of Fort Lauderdale, began streaming live video on the Internet from a laptop in his SUV to assure his customers that their cargo was safe. What he didn’t expect was that dozens of people would get a kick out of seeing him stuck in traffic in California or cruising between snow-covered mountains in Colorado.

“It just blows my mind,” said Oaklund, who escorts oversize loads, while parked in San Diego. “Right now there are 33 people who think this is interesting enough to watch. A lot of people tell me, ‘Oh, wow, this is cool because I am getting to see the country without leaving my desk.’ ”

Oaklund is a “lifecaster,” one of a growing number of people creating their own reality shows by broadcasting live for a few minutes or hours at a time from their computers or cell phones. Unlike videos uploaded to YouTube, lifecasters are inviting viewers into their world to see what they see, comment on it and ask questions, all in real time.

Broadcasting live from a webcam is nothing new, but what makes services such as Justin.tv, Ustream.tv and Yahoo Live (live.yahoo.com) different is that technology has evolved to the point where practically anyone can stream live from almost anywhere and interact with people who are watching.

You don’t need to be a technical genius or even have your own Web page. And with the spread of wireless Internet and the fact that webcams have become a standard feature on many new computers, you might not even have to buy anything.

Oaklund, 40, uses a mobile broadband connection to broadcast as the “Master Roadcaster” on Justin.tv. People tune in from all over the world to laugh at his jokes, make comments about other drivers, tell him to slow down or suggest hotels for him. While driving, he glances at the computer screen when it’s safe and speaks into a headset to respond to questions and comments. He usually has 15 to 100 people watching.

“People are already looking at video online, so wouldn’t it be funny if you could watch a funny video clip and you could tell the person doing it, ‘Hey, do that again’?” said Michael Seibel, CEO of Justin.tv.

Seibel started Justin.tv in 2006 with three friends to live-broadcast co-founder Justin Kan 24/7 as he walked around San Francisco with a camera attached to his hat. In October, the site opened to everyone, and it now has more than 430,000 registered users, about 34,000 of whom are broadcasters.

Britta Seisums, 18, typically streams live from her red-polka-dot-covered bedroom for about four hours after school each weekday. She plays games with viewers, dances to pop songs, hangs out with her friends, talks about school and curses out people who come into the chat room and are rude.

Seisums has been creating her own Web sites since she was about 10 and wants to work in Web development. “I keep the camera on as much as possible, but I like to have privacy. If I don’t want to be on camera, then I put the camera on my animals.”

In recent episodes, she has bathed her guinea pigs, painted a video-game console and accidentally spilled soda on her laptop.

The University of Central Oklahoma office of the Oklahoma Small Business Development Center has been named one of the top 10 small business development centers in the nation after winning the regional “Small Business Development Center Excellence and Innovation Award” from the U.S. Small Business Administration.

UCO’s development center office competed against small business development centers in Arkansas, Louisiana, New Mexico and Texas for the award after winning a similar award on a state level.

The center, which helps those throughout central Oklahoma who want to start or expand a small business, is now in the running to win the national award, which would recognize it as the top small business development center in the country.

Susan Urbach, director of UCO’s development center office, believes they stood out from other centers because of their emphasis on pro-activity and innovative technology.

“We are so excited about this award. I believe that what makes us special is the fact that we focus very much on staying at the forefront of information and technology. By always embracing change and development, we can be as efficient as possible in assisting our clients,” she said.

“We strive to teach them how to go from young businesses to professional status by turning their ideas into professional realities. You might say we help give their ideas both wings and feet.”

James Faulconer, president of MIDI for Kids and a former professor of music theory and composition, wanted to start a business that helps children learn to problem-solve through music. He went to the OSBDC for help.

Today, he credits Urbach and the OSBDC for MIDI’s success, which is currently helping 1,500 students and has been noted by some major music instrument manufacturers as the nation’s largest independent after-school music program.

“With Susan’s help, we now have programs in nearly 100 schools in five states and our Web site organization is truly amazing,” Faulconer said. “Oklahoma is really fortunate to have the devotion to purpose and inspirational guidance available through OSBDC. Without Susan and OSBDC, our business would simply not exist.”

UCO’s OSBDC is a bilingual organization that serves about 500 individual clients annually, helping the Oklahoma economy create 330 new jobs last year.