Podcast: Accessing the Effect of DEMO 08

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While emerging technologies can come from anywhere, one event that has seen its fair share of new products and technologies emerge is the DEMO conference. Over the year everything from the Palm PDA to Salesforce.com's hosted sales force management solution to the Tivo has been introduced to the world through the Demo conference.

But what about the DEMO 08 conference that concluded this past week? Will it be the launching point for some new paradigm shifting product or technology?

To look back I spoke to DEMO Executive Producer Chris Shipley about this past week's conference.

This DEMO definitely saw some interesting products designed to solve actual problems that people have. But will these products become household names of the future or fade into oblivion? Only time will tell.

Podcast: Educating Virtual Worlds

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Over the course of this year, virtual worlds got a lot of attention. More than a few businesses spent serious money trying to build presences in virtual worlds such as Second Life. But most of these efforts have so far been pretty big failures.

The question is, were these businesses going about it the right way and did they have the right focus?

One area that they may want to look to for guidance is higher education. A group called Media Grid is working on building a platform to use multiple virtual worlds, from Second Life to games like World of Warcraft, as a collaborative meeting space, providing what they refer to as immersive education. This focus on openess and collaboration shows a potential direction towards gaining real value out of virtual worlds.

I recently spoke to Aaron E. Walsh, Director of Media Grid, about their efforts in virtual worlds and education.

Podcast: Citrix and the Next Generation Web

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New technologies effect every one of us. For example, the Web 2.0 world has changed the way we socialize and communicate and how we use and even create applications.

And of course large technology vendors are not immune to these effects, if anything, new technologies effect them more than regular users and businesses. For these vendors, adapting to new technologies can mean the difference between future success or irrelevance.

I recently had the opportunity to speak to Wes Wasson, Chief Strategy Office for Citrix, about how Citrix is responding and adapting to new technologies, especially those in the Web 2.0 arena.

Podcast: Building an Online Database

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Currently there is a rush in all technology quarters to change the way that we use productivity applications. The main goal of this movement is to supplement or even replace outright classic office suites. Not surprisingly pretty much all of the major technology companies are involved, including Microsoft and Google.

However, one classic application has been left behind in this movement, namely the database, and those online databases that have appeared have been really just spreadsheets on steroids.

Zoho is One of the smaller vendors in the online office suite market but also has one of the more mature offerings. So it's no surprise that they are one of the first to try to bring true database capabilities to an online suite offering.

I recently spoke to Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna about a new product, Zoho DB. Zoho DB is designed to be a full database that can step in for database systems such as Oracle, SQL Server and MySQL.

Podcast: Combining BI and Search

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Dealing with the massive crush of data and information that can be produced by a modern city is a daunting task. To help handle this problem, the city of Albuquerque recently launched a program to combine the strengths of their Cognos business intelligence system, with the easy usability and broad reach of their Google enterprise search solutions.

I recently had the chance to speak with two people who have worked closely on this project; Brian Osterloh, applications development manager for the city of Albuquerque, and Chris Framel, the Technical Program Manager II of the Albuquerque/Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority.

Toner Goes NanoTech

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When conversations turn to exciting emerging technologies, one of the last topics that people will expect to come up is toner. When most people think of toner, they think of messy black powder.

However, a new technology from Xerox has some pretty interesting implications for toner and printing overall.

Emulsion Aggregation, or EA, is a nanotechnoloy based system that changes the way toner is produced and used. Rather than the grinding of existing materials process that is used for traditional toner, EA toner is chemically grown to specific micron sized particles. This procedure can reduce costs and environmental impact of toner for both producers and users.

I recently spoke to Mary Fromm, Manager, World Wide Toner Manufacturing, for Xerox, about a new full scale plant that Xerox is launching to produce EA toner, and also asked her about the specific technogical aspects of EA toner.

Podcast: Voting on Open Documents

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Most people don't think too much about the format that they are saving documents in, that is, until they receive a document that they can't open or they send one that the recipient can't open.

For many years now this has been the way it is in business, whether one is sending documents created in different office suites or in different versions of the same office suite.

This problem has led to the push for open document formats, and by far the most mature solution in this area is ODF or the Open Document Format. ODF is ISO approved and is used in suites such as StarOffice and OpenOffice and also in Google's web applications. However, the ODF alliance, a group formed to help promote and spread the use of ODF, has found itself in a battle to get states and governments to use its format.

The main competition has come not surprisingly from Microsoft, the king of office suites. Recognizing the push in goverments and many businesses to support open formats, Microsoft has been pushing its OOXML or Office Open XML format. Microsoft has maintained the openness of its format and has gotten some states to recognize it as an open format but recently OOXML ran into a big roadblock when it lost a key vote towards becoming an ISO standard.

Today I am speaking with Marino Marcich, Managing Director of the ODF alliance, about this recent ISO vote, what effect it will have on OOXML, and its effect on the spread of the ODF format.

Podcast: Next Generation Homeland Security

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Emerging technologies can have a dramatic effect on many aspects of society, from how business gets done to how people interact with each other.

But what about one of the most important issues of current times, namely homeland security?

Do emerging technologies like blogs, wikis and video phones impact the way that people and governments report on and respond to terrorist attacks and natural disasters?

One person who thinks so is consultant W.David Stephenson, principal of Stephenson Strategies. In his practice and on his blog, stephenson has been covering what he calls Homeland Security 2.0.

I recently had the opportunity to talk to David about the effects that new technologies are having on keeping nations secure and involving the populace when it comes to response and notification.

Podcast: XO Laptop Innovations

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Few technologies in recent years have inspired as much interest or discussion as the One Laptop Per Child's effort to provide what has been called the $100 laptop to the developing world.

When it was first discussed, many said it would be impossible to build a laptop for anywhere near that price. And then, as the laptop came closer to reality, many took to critizing its capabilities and its mission to provide computing resources as an educational tool for children around the world.

But now the $100 (actually $175) laptop, dubbed the XO, is going into mass production and will soon be in the hands of millions of children in the developing world. However, while much of the focus has been on the price of the laptop, many of the most impressive aspects of the XO are in its technology. The XO has made some impressive breakthroughs in power management, display technology and collaboration.

I recently had the opportunity to spend time at the offices of the OLPC and take a first hand look at the final beta of the XO.

While there, OLPC President Walter Bender gave me a demo of the XO's Sugar software interface and I also got on the phone with OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen to talk about the many technology innovations in the XO hardware.

Free VOIP Phone Calls Forever

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With the recent growth in the popularity of Voice Over IP services or voip, many have benefited from cost efficiencies and feature benefits of using the Internet to handle phone calls. For businesses VOIP has become a mature and capable platform for voice communications.

However, at home, the situation has been less clear. Sure PC-based systems like Skype have become ubiqitous, and pretty much everyone has heard about Vonage, the largest provider of VOIP services for the home. But the home market has seen some pretty down times.

Recently Sunrocket, the second largest provider, shut its doors. And Vonage has been suffering from a long running patent fight with Verizon that could still prove fatal for the upstart VOIP provider.

But despite these setbacks there are still businesses looking to provide innovative VOIP solutions for home users. The latest to come across my radar is ooma. ooma is launching a new hardware based solution that will plug into users existing phone systems and provide unlimited calling options. And interestingly, there will be no monthly fee. ooma devices will require a single hardware purchase cost (in the $400 dollar range) and then no monthly costs after that.

I spoke to ooma CEO Andrew Frame about their new product, which is just now launching its beta program.