Joe Peichel

Palm Company: Press Room Palm Unveils New Web Browser Optimized for Handhelds -- It's about time!! This has been a major gap between the base PocketPC and PalmOS platforms, leaving Palm users and advocates feel like 2nd-class citizens. It's annoying that they decided to charge for it, instead of just including it in the base OS distribution and making it available for download as an OS update. Still, it's an improvement over PQAs...

Bluetooth Qualification Program Website - Qualified Products OK, I'm blown away! Bluetooth has begun to take hold in the market, despite predictions that it would falter due to high component costs and a larger-than-acceptable physical footprint. Evidently the technology has been able to exploit Moore's Law and drive ruthless execution to deliver customer value in a much shorter timeframe than I would have expected. Clearly, the wireless market is now solidifying into three segments -- WANs, LANs and PANs, each of which either has adopted or is approaching a standard (LANs=802.11x, PANs=Bluetooth, WANs~=3G?). It's a pretty safe bet that, by the end of this calendar year, laptop & PDA vendors will take big steps toward integrating wireless PAN and LAN support (though PDAs will probably lean more toward PAN + WAN). Here's the daydream I'm caught up in -- I'm walking down the airport concourse toward my departure gate when my cellphone/PDA vibrates. ...

ARTS & FARCES internet : Radio community subversion "Personal computers infiltrated organizations through the back door. Someone brought one in to make his or her job easier and the notion spread, like a virus. RCS is going to infiltrate organizations the same way." Ran across this in Dave Winer's " Scripting News " and had to read the whole thing... I mentioned something very similar in a conversation with a fellow blogger earlier today -- "This is viral software...two people will start using it, a few more will notice and try it, and pretty soon you've got 1,000 users blogging..." RCS taps an unmet need in large corporations by hitting a "sweet spot" of features for knowledge capture, organization, and sharing at a price point that avoids the typical capital process (and dramatically undercuts traditional content management products, though RCS is about different things than something like Interwoven or Vignette). Thanks, D...

Java: Potent Security "Application security and interface security are more than just niche elements of next-generation IT. Security is the prerequisite to mobility: Without security, most mobile technologies are unacceptably vulnerable to interception and man-in-the-middle attacks. Security is the foundation of e-commerce: Without it, there can be no spontaneous formation of trust relationships among previously unknown parties, nor can there be guarantees of nonrepudiation of electronic transactions. Security is the substrate of remotely administered systems and centrally managed code: Without it, all such mechanisms are unacceptable risks." As I mentioned earlier today (see my reference to Dave Winer's "Scripting News" mention of web services), SECURITY is the foundation for much of the value-based IT work in BigCos. Without it, there's always a question about the validity or reliability of the information obtained from the service. I expec...

Dave Winer's Scripting News Weblog "In this release I also wired up both the Blogger API and the MetaWeblog API to Radio's SOAP interface. It would be interesting to see a blogging tool in .Net or other environments that have strong SOAP support. Maybe this is what the SOAP world is waiting for -- something to work on that has clear benefits to users. All the consorting and sparring among the Big's has yielded little utility so far, mostly science projects. " (bolding is mine, not the Dave's; ed.) Dave makes a great point about the "science projects" underway in the BigCos; however, in defense of the BigCos (as I am employed by one!), the lack of acceptable security standards in many web services implementations prevents adoption for any serious (aka revenue or ROI-related) transactional stuff. However, Radio and RCS may have hit the sweet spot for delivering real business value on top of a web services-based platform. Can the BigCos offer so...

Cellular show in Orlando to offer Wi-Fi network | Computerworld News & Features Story -- "Tom Wheeler, president and CEO of the CTIA, said in a statement that the decision to offer Wi-Fi access at the cellular show marks 'a leap in to the next era of wireless,' adding that 'there is a great, synergistic opportunity for Wi-Fi and existing wireless carriers to work together to build a seamless national network that will bring consumers into the next era of the wireless Internet.'" If only ! I'm a little skeptical about this, though at least some of the major domestic carriers (Voicestream, Sprint) have made investments in Wi-Fi service providers and are more likely to try integrate rather than obliterate. If the two can be successfully married, one can imagine "always-on" wireless Internet to laptops, PDAs, cellphones and (probably) other Internet appliances.

Ernie the Attorney Blogging toward "Knowledge Management." -- Dave Winer mentioned this blog in Scripting News and it's a thought-provoking piece, particularly in the context of how much attention (and $$) I see devoted to the subject at my employer. DW also mentioned another related idea earlier in SN -- "BTW, another reason I blog is patents." The fact that patents must take into account any previous art prevents someone being allowed to take full credit for ideas that appear elsewhere in the "weblog knowledge cloud."

AOL Replaces IE with Netscape in New Beta I think it's interesting that AOL's finally prepared to "bet the company" on its own alternative to IE. I wonder if it's got anything to do with the fact that "Mozilla now supports SOAP ." (quoted from Mozilla 0.9.9 Release Notes - What's New ) AOL's finally got a browser platform that can act as a web services "user agent", opening new opportunities for their users and content providers that parallel (or perhaps even exceed) those promised by Microsoft with .NET. Expect more news on this in the next year...

Web Services Wave - Major hurdles must be overcome, but the time is right for close evaluation. "Until now, and for the near future at least, Web services are more hype than substance...(however) expect legions of Web services advocates to crop up soon, and stay away from those who aren't pledging unswerving dedication to the World Wide Web Consortium's XML and SOAP standards work. Web services are the great leveler of heterogeneous networks, a universal communicator technology for IT." The buzz about web services is beginning to remind me of the mid-90s when browsers were gaining momentum in the press and on people's PCs. The good news is that, as with the former trend, web services are poised to achieve the same ubiquity and market appeal, translating into more opportunities for developers, service providers, and users alike.

Bringing 3D to the Web - Tech News - CNET.com "Bringing 3D to the Web -- Virtual Reality Modeling Language is back from the dead--again." OK, so I hope W3C will coordinate between X3D and SVG to make certain they're complementary. There's bound to be substantial existing work in SVG that can be applied to 3D, and it would be a shame to miss the opportunity to leverage it.

High-speed access debate goes to D.C. - Tech News - CNET.com -- "WASHINGTON--Hotly contested legislation that would give regional telephone giants a boost in the high-speed Internet market is set to be considered in the U.S. House of Representatives this week." The Baby Bells are whining that they need favorable legislation in order to compete with cable operators offering broadband. Unwilling to accept any risk, the telcos want the feds to give them an insurance policy (read "subsidy") to offset their long-needed investments in fiber infrastructure. If they'd gotten off the dime several years ago and laid the optical infrastructure they so desparately need, they'd be in a better competitive position with respect to the cable companies. My advice to the telcos -- stop whining, build out, and watch the subscription rates rise.

-- "Amazon Calls New iMac Its Fastest-Selling Computer According to Amazon's sales data, systems manufactured by Apple (including the Titanium PowerBook G4 and iBook) currently claim 10 of the top 25 bestseller spots at the online giant's computer store." Apple may finally be on the road to increasing their marketshare in the PC industry. With so many hit products selling in such volumes, their numbers are bound to improve. Go Steve!

HotScripts.com -- Another interesting catalog of useful scripts in a variety of languages.

What Architects Know and Do 'In the organizational phases of the architecting process, we make the point that sponsorship by the management community, and buy-in by the technical community, are vital to the success of the architecture. The political aspect of the architect's role frustrates many architects who just want to "get the job done".' This point is frequently overlooked by IT pros. Successful technology architectures and platforms are a delicate balancing act between vision, technology, concensus-building, evangalism, and diplomacy. People like Steve Jobs & Bill Gates have become masters of this discipline, and anyone considering a role in technology architecture would do well to take lessons from their experience. I'm not saying we should all become Gates clones (what a boring world that would make ;-), but one can admire an individual's achievements in one area while deploring the same person's behavior in others.

Doubt cast over Web standard's ownership -- "Vancouver-based UFIL Unified Data Technologies, a private company, claims that it owns U.S. patent 5,684,985, a "method and apparatus utilizing bond identifiers executed upon accessing of an endo-dynamic information node." The patent was awarded in November 1997." This could have far-reaching implications for some SmallCos whose products & technologies exploit RDF and RSS. It'll be interesting to see if enough prior work can be uncovered to invalidate the patent claim.

IBM WebSphere : Competitive Review Building Web Services the right way using IBM WebSphere Studio -- IBM's response to Microsoft's assertion that .NET is superior to J2EE indicates that, even though much of the development community sees web services as a "level playing field," the vendors will continue to duke it out over whose technology is superior, easier-to-use, etc. Of course, there are plenty of SmallCos pioneering in web services, so the development community should have enough choices to avoid being trampled by the BigCos.