Welcome!

Devoted to winnowing the technology goose feathers from the giblets

Jeremy Geelan

Subscribe to Jeremy Geelan: eMailAlertsEmail Alerts
Get Jeremy Geelan via: homepageHomepage mobileMobile rssRSS facebookFacebook twitterTwitter linkedinLinkedIn


Latest Articles from Jeremy Geelan
90+ speakers - March 18-20, 2008 - from Danny Allan, Jean-Francois Arcand, Roland Barcia, Robb Beal, David Boloker, Jeff Brown, Shane Bryzak, Bob Buffone, Robert Boedigheimer, Kurt Cagle, Kord Campbell, Marco Casario, Lauren Cooney, Douglas Crockford...to Scott Regan, David Schlesinger...
'Web 2.0' is an example of what the historian Daniel Boorstin would have called 'the Fertile Verge.' Web 2.0 is also a Boom Town, and - as Virginia Postrel points out - 'Boom towns break down barriers; they mix together talent from everywhere; they challenge complacency and overturn a...
The OOXML Ballot Resolution Meeting (BRM) in Geneva ended in tears. Sun's Tim Bray immediately recorded his thoughts on the meeting, and his verdict was withering: despite some good that perhaps came of it ('With a very few exceptions, everyone really tried hard to work together and ma...
Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft's platform and services division, sent round an email on Friday to provide Microsoft employees of the Platforms & Services Division with an update on the company's Feb. 1 proposal to combine with Yahoo! We bring you here the text in full.
I am always being told off by i-technologists for quoting Picasso as having said that computers are useless. But I still love his reasoning: 'Because they can only give you answers.' Picasso, like AJAXWorld Magazine, liked questions. So we thought we would share with you what some of t...
Being held for the first time on March 18, 2008 at the historic Roosevelt Hotel in New York City, AJAXWorld Security Bootcamp is a compelling, intensive, one-day, hands-on training program that will teach Web developers, Web designers, and other Web professionals how to build secure AJ...
Is Yahoo! too large a company to force into Microsoft's ways? That's the question asked this morning by The New York Times, whose correspondents John Markoff and Matt Richtel report a Silicon Valley executive as declaring that, when it comes to overall technology mindsets, Microsoft an...
Is AJAX fit to serve as spear carrier for next-generation Web technology? That question, asked by the San Diego Business Journal in March 2007, was answered by the sheer scale of the last two AJAXWorld Conference & Expos, in March (New York) and September (Santa Clara). The undisputed ...
MySQL's Mårten Mickos has been speaking out on the deep background to his company's decision, instead of pursuing an IPO, to allowing Sun to acquire it. 'We feel like we have joined a giant startup,' Mickos gushes, before singling out Jonathan Schwartz's 'brilliant' CEO charisma as one...
'It is very important to me that Acquia has a marketing leader who understands the importance of growing and sustaining a community and who is passionate about the principles of open source software,' said Acquia co-founder and CTO Dries Buytaert as Jeff Whatcott joined the company as ...
Would Microsoft be able to use its acquisition of Yahoo! to 'shake its obsession with catching Google and instead look to the next generation of the Internet,' asked John Markoff in The New York Times yesterday. Writing in his popular 'Silicon Valley Memo,' Markoff nailed the one thing...
Sun is offering ten grants of US $11,500 - equivalent to several months of pay for developers in some countries - for the best NetBeans projects submitted by open source developers. Conceived as a means of increasing general awareness around the NetBeans project as well as rewarding go...
'One of the most important (if not the most important) news for 2008, and we are just in February,' remarked Nelson Cienfuegos of the In Digital Marketing blog. He and nearly 60,000 others bloggers have been vigorously chewing over the ins and outs of Microsoft's $44.6BN mega-bid to ac...
'The combination of these two great teams would enable us to jointly deliver a broad range of new experiences to our customers that neither of us would have achieved on our own,' said Ray Ozzie, chief software architect at Microsoft, as the Redmond giant announced today that it has pro...
When the Domain Name System (DNS) was created 25 years ago, eight years before the introduction of the World Wide Web, a few hundred machines were connected to the Internet. Today more than 130 million are connected, and this number is expected to grow substantially as the majority of ...
'ICANN's work coordinating the Internet's addressing system is at the foundation of the Internet and its future - and we are always looking for people who want to make a contribution,' said Hagen Hultzsch, Chair of the Nominating Committee of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names...
Google's main page today celebrates the 50th anniversary of the iconic LEGO brick. Today?s LEGO bricks still fit bricks from 1958, but more importantly it is one of Denmark's best-known exports, along with programming language creators Anders Hejlsberg, Bjarne Stroustrup, and Rasmus Le...
Virtualization Journal thought it was time to go in search of industry insights into this fast-growing new IT market, and so we asked some of its new and up-and-coming executives for their thoughts on some of the trends emerging already in 2008. First, in view of the memo released rece...
'I'm close to being convinced that Oracle wanted to buy MySQL to kill the product, but knew it couldn't pull off the stunt itself. So it sent in a stooge to do the job.' That, in a nutshell, is John Dvorak's (unqualified?) opinion on the $1BN deal last week. But his allegations of cons...
2007 was the undoubtedly the year of Social Networking, but what of 2008? Will '08 be the year of 'Unified Communications' or the year when CMS comes to stand for 'Community Management System' - or even 'Collaboration Management System'? Or will it be the year of a giga-merger, to beat...
Is JSON better than XForms? That's an apples and oranges argument. I am willing to predict that XForms + XQuery will become a powerful enterprise model for rich form content, because the enterprise is considerably more XML-centric than the consumer stack is. I'm willing to predict that...
When in 2005 we asked our globe-girdling network of industry executives, enterprise architects, software engineers, technology evangelists, analysts, and VCs to pinpoint what they thought the Next Big Thing would be, only one respondent singled out Virtualization and that was software ...
Is it easy yet to make AJAX applications that easily go offline? Are developers better off using an AJAX framework, a toolkit or just coding their own AJAX/JavaScript? Will JavaScript 2.0 be a success, or a dud? How can AJAX apps be made secure? Sessions on these and dozens of other to...
Google's new-year special logo, which went live briefly as 2008 began, celebrated the 25th anniversary of TCP/IP - adopted by Arpanet on January 1st, 1983. While 'invisible' to most users, many of the layers built on top of TCP/IP are well-known even to laymen: HTTP (Hyper Text Transfe...
Time magazine has chosen and posted what it considers to be the top 50 web sites of 2007 - sites that show, '...exceptional style and smarts, sites that offer new and improved ways to access and share content, generate our own and otherwise enrich the online (and off-line) experience.'...
2007 was undoubtedly the year of Social Networking, but what of 2008? Will '08 be the year of 'Unified Communications' or the year when CMS comes to stand for 'Community Management System' - or even 'Collaboration Management System'? Or will it be the year of the giga-merger, to beat t...
A robust ecosystem of solutions providers is emerging around cloud computing. Here, SYS-CON's Cloud Computing Journal expands its list of most active players in the fast-emerging Cloud Ecosystem, from the 'mere' 100 we identified back in January of this year, to 250 - testimony, if any...
Coach Wei, whose Java credentials are impeccable, opened up a can of worms by raising the issue of why Java's not in favor any more for building web sites, even complex ones. Even a complex site like Facebook, Wei noted, is not written in Java. 'Why do 'cool kids' choose Ruby or PHP to...
'We are pleased that Estonia and Estonian entrepreneurs - through Enterprise Estonia - have chosen San Jose as their West Coast landing pad to establish strong relationships with other top global technology companies here in the Silicon Valley,' said San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed as he and...
'HTML has long been at war with itself,' writes Yahoo! Architect Douglas Crockford, one of the most popular speakers at AJAXWorld ever since it began life early in 2006. 'Is it a document format or is it an application delivery format? You can see that confusion in the cacophonous HTML...
In a move to bolster its attempt to add a social layer on top of the entire suite of Google services, Google yesterday joined other leading social networking players in introducing a common set of standards to allow software developers to write cross-network programs. According to The ...
Anything you can do on your Facebook web page you will shortly be able to do instead on your BlackBerry, thanks to a new Facebook app being released by RIM, the makers of BlackBerries. RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis made the announcement yesterday at the CTIA conference in San Francisco. Fo...
When Microsoft parted with $240M for a 1.6% stake in a company with $140M in revenues and $30M in profits, was it over-paying? Conspiracy theorists were quick to say that the move was deliberate, to inflate the overall value of Facebook to $15BN and thereby prevent anyone else from buy...
The BBC carried a report yesterday that raises the alarming possibility of extending cellphone use on board airplanes from just either end of a journey to throughout the duration of the flight. The key to the whole thing, the technical trick that circumvents the problem found in 2003 b...
While it won't be changing its policy forbidding users from unlocking the iPhone to use it with carriers other than AT&T, Apple has relented: in February it will make an iPhone SDK available. 'We think a few months of patience now will be rewarded by many years of great third-party app...
BEA, Cognos, and Informatica have all been named yesterday by a Credit Suisse analyst Jason Maynard as possible acquisition targets in the wake of the SAP acquisition of Business Objects. In a note released to Credit Suisse clients yesterday, Maynard reportedly said: 'The SAP/Microsoft...
Pablo Picasso was on to something when he declared that computers are useless 'because they can only give you answers.' Conferences, on the other hand, can also give you questions.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin registered the google.com domain in 1997, and Google was officially launched one year later, making Google 9 this year. Google's birthday has always been celebrated on September 27th with a doodle displayed on the homepage, and today is no exception.
Sybase, Inc., has announced, in conjunction with Sun Microsystems and BMMSoft, that Sybase IQ powers the world's largest data warehouse implemented in history, as noted in the independently audited report. The benchmarks were achieved in large part due to the compression capability of ...
'SOA is an increasingly important business requirement for organizations because of the business flexibility it enables,' said Sandy Carter, Vice President of IBM SOA and WebSphere, as MSC.Software this week announced its acceptance to the IBM SOA Specialty after successfully completin...