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.

THIS week MySpace will unveil the biggest website redesign the company has ever undertaken.

After a year of development and planning, the social network will roll out a series of new features designed to simplify the user experience, starting this Wednesday.

Rebekah Horne, vice president of Fox Interactive Media and MySpace in Australia and New Zealand, said a lot of the changes were based on user messages sent to MySpace founder and first friend of every new user Tom Anderson.

Flock, which was founded in 2005, allows users to easily monitor social-networking sites by integrating them into the browser. When a user logs into a site such as Facebook, Flock allows the user to see what is happening with their friends in its sidebar, keeping track of status and comments. If, for example, a friend uploads a picture, the user will get an update and be able to drag or share that picture with other friends in other social networks.

“This is not the old model to click on a website and go from site to site in a fragmented experience,” Flock chief executive Shawn Hardin said. “We have a core mission to put the user at the centre of their online universe”.

Hardin believes Flock’s browser experience is the biggest step in browser development since “Netscape took a stream of 0s and 1s and created a visual interface”.

The user experience is now changing from information being consumed to being communicated, according to Hardin, who hopes Flock will make an impact as big Netscape: “We aspire to be part of this key inflection, as Netscape was years ago.”

Hardin claims that since version 1.0 was released in November, users have been increasing by around 10 to 20 percent per week ?with a total of 2.5 million downloads over the last year. Hardin said this compares with 130 million Firefox users and 1.4 billion Internet Explorer users.

Although the demise of Netscape is sad, Hardin said, its spirit lives on: “Netscape is still at the heart of Firefox and Flock.” He added that a significant part of his development team created Netscape 8.

Hardin doesn’t see Flock as a direct competitor to Firefox because he is only interested in the 100 to 200 million users who are regular social-networking users.

With half the world’s population soon owning a mobile phone, the opportunity to reach more people on the web via a mobile device is huge. Research firm Gartner predicts that worldwide mobile advertising revenue will grow from less than $1bn last year to $11bn in 2011. Google has already been adapting its web search, mapping service, and advertising tools to work on mobile phones. And it’s even bidding in a US auction of wireless spectrum and developing software for mobile phones.

The company has also spearheaded the Open Handset Alliance ?which advocates open standards for mobile software ?in an effort to co-ordinate its work with that of handset makers, chip developers, application developers and mobile-phone operators.

Because Google has dominated search and advertising on the traditional internet, the expectation is that the company will also take the mobile market by storm using the same tools and the same strategies. But shoehorning its existing web tools and applications onto a tiny mobile phone isn’t going to be easy. If Google is not careful, it may find itself chasing some new, innovative start-up that figures out how to out-Google Google in mobile.

“In some ways Google is now the incumbent,” said Farhad Divecha, director of the search and mobile marketing firm AccuraCast. “Their search products and advertising tools aren’t the best right now, so there’s a good chance someone could come in and do it better.”

Back to basics with search Google first came on the scene a decade ago with a new search algorithm that could serve up better and more relevant content to users than had ever been done before. So while other companies, such as Alta Vista and Yahoo, had been in the search business for years before Google came along, it was this giant leap forward in the user experience that catapulted the company to success.

It is not surprising that search was one of the first tools Google adapted for mobile phones. And by most accounts the tool works fine. When used with the Google Maps application, mobile users can even search for local restaurants and get directions to each establishment.

But critics of Google’s mobile search tool say its results aren’t always as relevant as results from a desktop Google search. Another common complaint is that Google provides search results from regular web pages and tries to trans-code them for mobile phones. Often these sites don’t render well on certain phones.

Yahoo Go, a similar application, is considered more robust and more user-friendly than Google’s search tool.