From the Editor

Okta Seeks to Accelerate Secure Adoption of Cloud Apps

Mon, 31 Jan 2011 06:15:00 EST

"Enterprises everywhere are realizing the inherent benefits of running their core IT services in the cloud,” said Todd McKinnon, most recently VP of Engineering at Salesforce.com from 2003 to 2009, and now CEO of the on-demand identity and access management service, Okta. "This shift fundamentally requires them to rethink their IT infrastructure and how their employees access it," McKinnon added. "Okta," he continued, "is the only enterprise class, on-demand service purpose built to help customer secure and manage their entire cloud services network and the people who need access to it, with no professional services required."

A Twitter Epiphany? The Power of a Hash Tag (#jan25)

Sat, 29 Jan 2011 06:00:00 EST

As America - on the East Coast anyway, including in Washington, DC - tucks up in bed, the sun is rising on Egypt. Which seems an appropriate time for @jg21 to briefly explain what I had in mind when resolving for the past 12 hours or so to re-Tweet as many of the comments and links flying around via Twitter as I found meaningful, informative, and (often) inspiring.

Facebook, Google, and the Near-Term Future of the USA

Fri, 28 Jan 2011 08:45:00 EST

On the day when the Dow Jones Industrial Average topped 12,000 for the first time since June 2008, it was impossible not to correlate the eloquence and optimism of President Obama's "State of the Union" speech on Tuesday night with the restoration of a sense of perspective and hope in the USA about the future.

Why Blogging is Not a True Co-Technology

Sat, 02 Oct 2010 22:15:00 EDT

Speaking Thursday in Tokyo at The New Context Conference 2010, the founder of Twitter, Biz Stone (pictured), put onto the record two sentences that will stand the test of time in the era of social computing: "Twitter isn't a triumph of technology it's a triumph of humanity. A more connected world leads to a more empathic world."

Is 2010 the End of the Beginning for New Media?

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 05:15:00 EDT

If Tim Berners Lee had thought for a moment, back in 1990, that his invention at CERN of http + HTML + server + browser was going 20 years later to eliminate Newsweek from newsstands worldwide, he might have gone back to studying physics instead of ushering in the World Wide Web. But what's done is done, and what interests me in this Times piece by David Carr is not so much the End-of-Newsweek story as the meta message of the article which is the contention that we now live in an age where the periodicity of publications has become a potential showstopper.

Adobe and Social Media Terrorists

Tue, 26 May 2009 08:00:00 EDT

"Mass psychology" scientists study this kind of phenomena and the "mass psychology of fascism" is of course the most famous lab case. The extraordinary experience SYS-CON Media lived through became part of a Forbes Magazine investigative cover story called "Attack of the Blogs" that found that "Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective. Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo." The lies, libel and invective we are living through today is another such episode. Our partners, readers and the industry in general know the facts and what's going on but in a rare example like the email below, we can't be sure if everyone is on the same page as the rest of us.

Really Stupid Tech Conference Ideas: Web 3.0 Conference

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 13:00:00 EDT

Web 2.0 was a big scam to start with. The name "Web 2.o" was stolen by Mr. Tim O'Reilly (the prophet) from Imagine Media's brilliant new launch of "Business 2.0 Magazine" during the heyday of the dot-com explosion. The promise of Web 2.0 was that everybody in the software industry would be billionaires just like the folks who introduced MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, etc. Of course this never happened.

I Would Have Loved to Join President Obama On His Trip to Turkey

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:00:00 EDT

Obama's stop in Turkey, announced last week in Ankara by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, partly fulfills Obama's pledge to engage the Muslim world in a substantive way within his first 100 days in office. But the president is not expected to use the Turkey visit to deliver his anticipated address on Islam, a speech he promised during his campaign to give in a Muslim capital soon after taking office.

SYS-CON Survey: What Drives Successful Technology CEOs?

Mon, 19 May 2008 07:30:00 EDT

What drives a technology CEO or CTO to success in today's constantly changing technology ecosystem? We look at the question through the lens of the many interviews and articles we have published at SYS-CON.com which deal, sometimes only in passing, with exactly this issue. Executives quoted include Appcelerator CEO Jeff Haynie, Nexaweb Co-Founder & CTO Coach Wei, the founder of Internet.com Alan Meckler, and the Chairman & CEO of Parasoft Dr Adam Kolawa.

There's No Boundary Between "Web 1.0" and "Web 2.0" - Just a Blurry Verge

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 05:45:00 EST

'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 assumptions. They are sometimes ugly and almost always stressful, but they foster invention, progress, and learning. And they let people chase their dreams.'

Web 2.0 - Web 3.0 - The "Social Web"

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 01:15:00 EDT

Let's consider the pages of a traditional corporate Website. They include an 'about me' page, a contact page, a careers section, and probably a page with news and press releases. The words look good on paper, and, more than likely, a committee gave the final sign-off on the site's content. Visitors frequent these pages because they want to learn about the company's products and services, contact the company by phone to request more information, or find a job.

Pointless Places, Boring Faces, and Useless Cases

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 16:30:00 EDT

Often in software I find myself preaching restraint to those who wish to move platforms for no apparent reason than to keep up with the IT fashion industry; however, even harder than the silver-bullet chasers is dealing with organizations where change is required, not only in a company's software stack, but throughout their entire IT department.

Did Microsoft Over-pay For Facebook?

Sun, 28 Oct 2007 05:00:00 EDT

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 buying it outright. TIME commented: 'The dotcom bubble just got bigger than ever.'

Is This the Death-Knell for Peace and Quiet in the Skies?

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 12:00:00 EDT

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 by the CAA that mobile phone signals skew navigation bearing displays by up to five degrees, is that cellphones in the plane are not allowed to connect to any base stations on the ground.

Dave Winer: "It's Time for Web 2.0 to Stop Being Exclusive"

Wed, 23 May 2007 20:15:00 EDT

A war of words has broken out in the world of Web 2.0 - between the software developer who created or was a lead contributor to several of the most popular XML dialects and APIs related to web publishing (RSS 2.0, XML-RPC, OPML, and the MetaWeblog API), Dave Winer, and the founder of O'Reilly Media - the self-proclaimed 'technology transfer company.'

i-Technology Blog: Is There Life Beyond Google?

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 07:30:00 EDT

What comes after Google? Where will the Web, the Internet, the whole nexus of telecommunications, i-Technology, and the quest for a better world, take us? My strong sense is as follows: if Web 2.0, as the joke goes, is about how we can make money out of Web 1.0, then Web 3.0 is going to going to be about how we can extract insight out of Web 2.0.

Google's Innovative Yet Limited AJAX Environment: GWT

Thu, 25 May 2006 08:30:00 EDT

Google's recent foray into delivering an Ajaxified Web application stack, the Google Web Toolkit, says much about Google's pragmatic method of delivering innovation to the market. I for one, would heartily recommend it for certain applications, while actively advising against it for others. One major issue is that Google makes a lot of assumptions in GWT that are non-starters for certain uses.

Sixteen Ways of Thinking in Web 2.0

Sun, 26 Feb 2006 14:45:00 EST

With apologies to Bruce Eckel, I sat down this afternoon and put together a draft list of the first-order elements of Web 2.0 thinking. It's not that I have the hubris to consider this list official in any way but it should be a serviceable starting point for debate, discourse, and reference. I'd also like to give credit to Jeremy Zawodny for his write-up pointing me to Tom Coat's excellent presentation notes from his Future of Web Apps talk which partially inspired this effort. I think both of them have really solid source material. But they still don't quite capture a complete high-level picture of the ingredients, forces, and decisions that have to go into thinking about, using, and building complete Web 2.0 software experiences.

Welcome to the Web 2.0 World of Flickr, del.icio.us, Writely, Basecamp, Digg, and Many Others

Wed, 01 Feb 2006 12:00:00 EST

Though it's a complex and often subtle topic - and recognizing that Web 2.0 definitions vary across the community - we believe 'Web 2.0' captures the current spirit of innovation in online software. And while some may dislike the term itself, we believe it's useful, broadly recognizable shorthand for the exciting new things that are happening in the online software world today.