A Conversation with Fred Wilson and Carlota Perez

A great interview very well worth watching if you have any stakes in the web industry. As a background, have a look at this power point presentation

RDS launch

Amazon has launched a new service yesterday. Finally, they offer a RDBMS as a service. MySQL 5.1 as it turns out was their choice. I'm good with that.
There are quite a few posts about this: no surprise: Werner Vogels, Amazon's CTO has a post as well as Cloud Ave, RightScale and TechCrunch to cite only the ones on my RSS feed list.

ISMIR 2009

There are a few good posts on the web regarding ISMIR 2009. Seems it was once again the place to be for anyone having anything to do with music signal processing and information retrieval. Paul Lamere has a few posts already on the conference. We were working on many of the topics discussed during the conference: music instrument recognition, tempo, music similarity for recommendation purposes. Economic realities forced us to stop our researches but it is nice to see that people are making progress on those topics.

Waves and Raindrops

Mozilla is at it again.In many ways they have revolutionized browsers with Firefox and all the plugins that make it a favorite amongst developers and "normal" users. They also had a fairly descent mail client in Thunderbird. Now, they are taking a stab at the future of email with Raindrop. From what I could see and read on the web regarding that project, it sounds very interesting.Mashable makes the connexion between Raindrop and Google Wave: both are trying to re-invent web based communication.
You might also be interested in ReadWriteWeb take on Raindrop or that of WebMonkey or GigaOM or TechCrunch

5 new tech trends you can't afford to ignore

Hypebot has a short post on their take on the up and coming trend. Except for #5, I'm totally with them on this. Have a look at this post here.

Wave security

ReadWriteWeb has a good post on Google's Wave security. What I take away from this article has less to do with Wave per se as with the fact that security was a concern addressed from the start. One would wish this would be the "obvious" approach not worth mentioning in an interview. Since it's not the case, kudos to Google for showing the way both with their products and with their methodology.

Salesforce Winter 2010

I attended a good webinard/sales pitch from Salesforce yesterday. They did not get in much technical details but they did show us very impressive new features coming soon. The following list is in no way exhaustive (for this, go here) but are rather the elements that caught my attention:

• It will now be possible to use batch code for long processes. Obviously, the execution will be asynchronous and will also be possible to manage under a new feature: the scheduler;
• The have enhanced the custom settings;
• They have worked on the data import;
• I beleive using Google doc, they now have content management API;
• Support for OAuth v. 1.0.a;
• email is greatly improved;
• sandbox to production management will be easier;
• integration to Google Analytics in Visualforce;
• https will be available for site;
• a pilot for a new type of user called "High volume portal user" will take place;
• analytics presentation will greatly be improved with:
• chart mixers;
• color picker;
• hover;
• IPhone and Blackberry are now well supported;
• Community-answer pilot will take place, leveraging Twitter and other web 2.0 API;

Bit Torrent for legitimate use

I have been investigating the use of BitTorrent for video conference distribution for a NOG that cannot afford CDN's fees. Very interesting technology, full of possibilities. But then, Techdirt has a great post that sour my interest somewhat. you can find this post here.

DimDim Video Conference

I was looking at open source solutions and found this product from DimDim. I really like to see the OS model successful.

Amazon' SQS

Alan Williamson has published a neet class that apparently makes accessing SQS easy. You can get it here.

SEO: free tools list

SEOptimise has publish this list of free, yet still relevant, tips or tools.

Clickstream

Seems like we can go much further in analytics than the usual, yet very interesting, Google Analytics and the likes. The concept is called "Clickstreams". One of the interesting proponent of the concept is crazyegg

Simple SSO

Seems there is a new free product avaiblable that makes using single sign on easier for web developer: https://rpxnow.com/

I read about it here