About

Founded in April 2007 as a think tank within Oracle Applications Strategy, AppsLab (@theappslab) was the brainchild of Paul Pedrazzi (@ppedrazzi). The team’s goal was to experiment with and drive adoption of emerging technologies and new web patterns, at the time characterized as Web 2.0.

Joining Paul on the team were Jake Kuramoto (@jkuramot), Anthony Lai (@anthonyslai) and Rich Manalang (@rmanalan); this team built Oracle’s first social networking tool, Oracle Connect, which has been used internally at Oracle since it went live as the IdeaFactory in July 2007. It also designed and launched Oracle Mix, the external Oracle social community, in November 2007.

In September 2009, the AppsLab joined Oracle WebCenter development, to continue driving new ideas into Oracle’s emerging social and collaborative products. While in WebCenter development, the team helped redesign the UI of the internal rollout instance of WebCenter and built several tools, extending WebCenter beyond the browser including an Android app and a sweet Chrome extension, using the WebCenter REST APIs.

In July 2010, Paul left Oracle. The team added Noel Portugal (@noelportugal) in May 2011, but subsequently lost Rich and Anthony to other companies later in 2011.

In December 2011, the remaining AppsLab team joined a newly-formed evangelism team within Oracle WebCenter Product Management spun up by Christian Finn (@cfinn). While on this team, Jake and Noel ran the first Oracle Developer Challenge at Oracle OpenWorld in 2012.

Jake left WebCenter development in November 2012 to return to his enterprise application roots, joining Jeremy Ashley’s Applications User Experience (@usableapps) team, where he continues to experiment with emerging technologies. He blogs here about Oracle Cloud Applications, User Experience and other topics.

Jake reformed the core team, bringing Anthony and Noel to OAUX. The team has since grown to thirteen strong, adding several talented developers, interaction and visual designers, architects and researchers around the US and in Mexico.

The mission remains the same, investigate emerging technologies that will shape the future experiences of our users, and with a dedicated team, strong investment and a focused strategy, the AppsLab serves as the Emerging Technologies arm of OAUX.

Constant through change, AppsLab continues to be a small team dedicated to living and breathing new technologies, and they continue to attempt to drive innovation into Oracle’s products and champion new ideas.

This blog is the historical record of their exploits and continues to be a space for sharing and discussion.

You can read more about the team, its approach and strategy and its various projects on the Oracle Applications User Experience Emerging Technologies page.

Effectively terminated as a team in April 2018, this blog lives on as the members of AppsLab document the next chapters of their careers.