Oracle’s Spin on Lunch 2.0

Tim Bonnemann and Marius Ciorea, two guys at Oracle corporate HQ, have started a Lunch 2.0 series with an Oracle spin. It’s modeled on Lunch 2.0, offering up discussion topics on new technologies, starting conversations around them and educating anyone who has an interest. The lunches have been a big hit so far, even though… Read More

Check out Oracle Events

As Justin pointed out yesterday, Oracle.com unveiled a very cool 2.0 (or dare I say, 2.0+) application called Oracle Events. This is a very useful mashup of the Oracle events calendar, Google Maps (surprise!) and a combination of Siderean Seamark and Oracle’s own Secure Enterprise Search. Many of you will recognize the semantic features that… Read More

Death of an Inbox

In a comment on my first post about the slow death of email as a communication medium, Julie asked: I guess you are talking about email in the context of personal communication rather than business? What are your thoughts on IM for business use, as a replacement for email? My position is that email is… Read More

Jake is Blogging about Facebook.

Yes, this is also my current Facebook status. By way of Nick O’Neill at All Facebook, I read a blog by Megan Berry today about the collision of her personal and professional lives on Facebook. It’s an interesting read. Aside from the irony of blogging about things she did not want her co-workers to see… Read More

Good Old Email in its Twilight Years

I’m sure most of you will not agree, or you’ll convince yourself otherwise. News.com has an interesting article with the catching headline, “Kids say e-mail is, like, soooo dead”. This got me to thinking about dead letters, for some odd reason. Like it or not, email is dying. Just like face-time gave way to phone… Read More

More High-Powered Friends?

First, it was Steve Ballmer. Now, Eric Schmidt? What is going on here? I’m surprised Eric would want to befriend me, since I called him coy in this space not once, but twice. Maybe he wants to hire me and doesn’t know I have no PhD, or even masters. D’oh. Seriously, can anyone shed some… Read More

Interesting . . .

By way of O’Reilly, this is cool, if you like data visualization. Internet Architects, a Japan-based design firm, maps “the 200 most successful websites on the web, ordered by category, proximity, success, popularity and perspective” to the Tokyo metro system, complete with placement symbolism for insiders. Another tidbit from last week, is this article from… Read More

New Tools for Lucky Oracle Users

Yesterday, OTN released the Oracle DBA Toolbar (screenshot) for Firefox and IE. A great little tool for any Oracle DBA. Kudos to Justin and his OTN crew for delivering innovative, useful tools for our customers. Readers of this space may be sick of hearing about OpenSearch plugins, but like it or not, people find them… Read More

Google Apps Suite Plows Ahead

Business Week has an article today about Google Apps. The suite looks more complete every day. Witness the Postini acquisition, the anticipated release of presentations (a combination of Zenter, Tonic Systems and probably some homegrown mojo too) this summer, the integration of JotSpot features and now, enterprise YouTube. This one jumped off the page for… Read More

Steve Ballmer is My Friend?

Fellow AppsLabb’er Rich, just informed me via IM (which is so 1999, why aren’t we Twittering?), that Steve Ballmer friended him on Facebook. Turns out that both Paul (AppsLab poobah) and I were also friended by Steve. Maybe the rumor is true, and Microsoft is digging out $6 billion for Facebook (Techmeme coverage). Or maybe… Read More

So Much for the Backup Plan

Maybe Eric Schmidt was reading this blog over the weekend. On Saturday, I observed that Eric was being coy when he called the enterprise an agreed that the enterprise was a backup plan for Google, just in case that whole advertising thing doesn’t pan out as planned. Today, Google announced it is acquiring Postini to… Read More

Too Many of Me, Part 2

Ionut Alex Chitu over at Google Operating System has a post about Socialstream, a new kind of social network, created by a project in the Master’s program at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute and sponsored by Google. Don’t the already have a orkut that’s kind of a big deal in Brazil? Anyway, the feature… Read More

Google’s Backup Plan

I read today that Google Apps will soon include the features acquired from JotSpot. Not that big a surprise, but adding wikis and web site building capabilities to Google Apps will make them even more compelling in comparison to Microsoft Office. I hope Docs and Spreadsheets will be graced with these features, too. Anyway, it… Read More

Too Many of Me

Jeff Nolan addresses an issue that many others (e.g. Robert Scoble, Anshu Sharma) have begun to complain about recently. Namely, there are too many social networks to use realistically, and no one has adequately addressed the requirement for a cross-network identity management tool. For people in a position to give advice on new technology (Which… Read More

More Thoughts on Facebook

I’ve been following Facebook closely since the platform launch in May, especially the enterprise aspects and Facebook as an alternative to LinkedIn for professionals. Rather than do a giant brain dump, I’ll post a piece each day (or so) until I’m tapped. The best place to start is with the platform. I covered this briefly… Read More

Nod to Justin from OTN

Thanks to Justin, editor of Oracle Technology Network (OTN), for his post on our internal Idea Factory. We hope the factory generates good feedback; we know some of the 70,000 people who work here have killer ideas. Now, we’re trying to mine them. Justin has been building OTN into the largest online community of developers… Read More