Using open source in the enterprise—the question is no longer “if,” but “how?” The low cost, easy access, and expansive license terms of open source are certainly attractive—especially since IT budgets have decreased 3-5% every year, while software costs have increased, and IT staffs have been tasked to create web services and pursue Web 2.0 initiatives.

 In a new report published by O’Reilly for CIOs, IT managers, and business owners who want to make smart decisions about deploying open source, you’ll find:

• The six primary drivers that lead companies to implement open source (sneak preview: “cost” is just one of them)
• Three action plans for implementing open source in your organization that help you move from ad hoc use to a more formal and measurable approach
• Surprising new data on open source’s penetration into enterprise IT

Through research, interviews, and innovative data mining, Open Source in the Enterprise reveals how enterprises are leveraging open source software to save money, gain control, and innovate in an era of Doing More With Less.

http://radar.oreilly.com/research/os-enterprise-report.html

remerber Monoslideshow’s transition with Ken Burns effect ?  Well seems that making videos from images has gone one step further with Animoto, a web application that creates MTV-style videos with the click of a button.

Users simply choose a song and images, and upload them through a web based ajax interface. Animoto then automatically generates a unique video for them. No two videos are ever the same.

Many of the post-production techniques that the founders used while working as producers for MTV, Comedy Central & ABC are used in Animoto’s patent-pending Cinematic Artificial Intelligence developed to think like an actual editor and director. The resulting video is produced in a widescreen format, containing the visual energy of a music video and the emotional impact of a movie trailer.

Animoto Productions is based in New York City with an office in San Francisco. More @ animoto.com

did they use a code generator ? Romanian developped JobberBase is so nicely coded that we would like to put a name on the framework that intiated this nice lightweight jobboard application. It won’t bother with user registration or profile maintenance:  jobberbase is one of the simplest expression of job listing application, may be even too simple to be true. Great work has been put into the design of the frond and back using MVC paradigm, Jquery helpers and smarty templates. Good job. More @ http://www.jobberbase.com/

Used by many news portals, the technique above is a great example of how to optimize layout of breaking news. We have gone the simple way with the image above, using a combination of Photoshop layers over a background image. The way it is implemented for Wordpress platform by Derek Punsalan illustrates the power of wordpress custom fields, and also the limits of this input system. We would like to have image custom input fields, such as file browser or color selector. The popular custom field GUI plugin handles select, checkboxes and radio buttons but would require extensions to handle more advanced input types. There is hack on Wordpress forums for that plugin  that handles Wysiwyg fields, but I would not expect it to be maintained over future versions of Wordpress. The “More Fields” Plugin is a bit more flexible and is worth having a look at too.

Ridiculously easy  time management & analytics : unlike stated by the name it wears, rescue time does not only manage timesheets. This free signup online service can also easily host project management with serious analytics letting you know instantly where you stand in terms of personal and group time management. Working without require you to tell what you’re doing on your PC, rescue time will record which application you’re using on your desktop and render the time spent according to keyword you’ve defined : “RescueTime really begins to sing once you’ve tagged the apps that you use most often. The tagging interface is designed to allow you to quickly label your untagged apps with the tags that make the most sense to you. We’ve found that you only need to tag a few dozen most-often-used apps to get exceptional value out of RescueTime”.

http://www.rescuetime.com/

We ‘ve covered Jquery, extjs and DOJO ’s grid : even though they all cover a gerat amount of features, none of them opensource celebrities can compete with chaklf GPL half commercial DHTMLXGRID, that delivers all features you can expect from a modern HTML AJAX powered Grid : buffered data (unlimited scrolling), editable fields with rich in-cell editing, fixed multiline headers/footers, resizable, sortable and draggable columns, built-in filtering, searching and grouping capabilities. Numerous event handlers let you add necessary interactivity to grid-based interfaces .The only drawback to relying on such vendors is that one day -it’s probably a matter of weeks- the opensource geeks will be up to date, including many more functions and compatibility guarantees. In the meanwhile, if you can’t afford to wait, go for DHTMLXGRID with GPL license. If you plan to switch technologies, make sure your server side data delivery complies to standards datasources supported by most javascript grids, such as XML or JSON.

If you’re using google Analytics to track visitors on your website, you might have found that 24 hours delay is a bit long : that’s the main drawback of this very popular web site anaysis service, provided by the famous google. In spite of its popularity, google analtyics has many challengers, among which woopra is a serious one as it performs instant analytics, including registered users follow up for popular applications such as worpdress. More than that, Woopra offers an API full of functions : real time notifications, instant chat with visitors, complex search algorithms within the statistics database. A good start for webmasters who want to dig deeper into the brain of their visitors. http://www.woopra.com/

Did you have a look at your server logs these last few days ? Ever worried about a stranger twiceler robot ? Well Cuil (Irish for knowledge) is the answer, a new search engine that aims to challenge google ! Press release : MENLO PARK, Calif.—July 28, 2008—Cuil, a technology company pioneering a new approach to search, unveils its innovative search offering, which combines the biggest Web index with content-based relevance methods, results organized by ideas, and complete user privacy. Cuil (www.Cuil.com) has indexed 120 billion Web pages, three times more than any other search engine.

Read the rest of this entry »

Cushy CMS, hosted Content Managemant platform, has invented an efficient concept : just modify the HTML code of your pages by addinc the “cushycms” class attribute to HTML elements, and these elements will be made editable via Cushy CMS’ interface. Technically, CushyCMs analyses your page, grabs appropriate elements and builds an editor within its interface. It then modifies the HTML code of the pages and transfers them to your host via FTP. Simple and efficient. http://www.cushycms.com/

This is hot : managing content with a mobile phone was only a distant dream for the masses until this application came live. the Wordpress for Iphone application is the kind of add on that makes you buy a phone if you’re a wordpress blogger, or that would make you swithc to wordpress if you were wondering which blogging platform is best. More than that, Iphone for wordpress lets you work with any self hosted wordpress (2.5.1 or higer) application, WordPress MU 1.5.1, or even wordpress.com blogging platform !! The App works with the new iPhone 3G, the first generation iPhone, and the iPod Touch. Its code has been released as opensource for developers to debug.