JavaRebel is a JVM plugin (-javaagent) that enables to reload changes made to Java class files on-the-fly, saving developers the time that it takes to redeploy an application or perform a container restart. It is a generic solution that works for Java EE and Java standalone applications.
In addition to that we have released a JavaRebel plugin for Spring that allows reloading/reinjecting Spring dependencies on-the-fly without reloading the bean factory or application context. We have prepared a screencast that demonstrates the Spring plugin features. See the plugin installation manual for more details or just download it.
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Almost six months after the companies started talking, WPP and Microsoft have reopened talks that could have the software company unloading Avenue A/Razorfish. But the question is whether Microsoft could ever get anyone to buy the digital ad agency for the price at which it needs to sell it.
Microsoft’s (NSDQ: MSFT) talks with WPP Group seem to be taking a more serious turn on the subject of the software giant selling off digital ad shop, Avenue A/Razorfish, AdAge reports. Microsoft acquired Avenue A/Razorfish when it bought parent aQuantive last August for about $6 billion. That purchase also included other aQuantive properties, among them ad network Atlas and digital marketing solutions provider DrivePM.
A (prospect) client asked me this morning why 85% of enterprise content management implementations fail. Well, here is the long answer:
There are numerous reasons for this high rate. For one, web architectures are complex implementation projects. Requirements are often not well understood, leading to bad software purchase decisions (”putting the cart before the horse”) and architectural choices. The largest group of in-house stakeholders, the content editing community, is often ignored and set to deal with unusable user front-ends and complex publishing workflows, preventing necessary user adoption. Content is often stored in presentation-heavy formats, content re-use across channels and applications is time-consuming or even impossible, the resulting duplication of content leads to inconsistent web experiences.
The remedy for these problems on the one hand lies in the definition sound processes and establishing clear channels of communication between stakeholders. On the other hand, building a solid technology foundation is another vital aspect. Not only must this foundation be flexible, stable, and easy to use, but the defining principles must be upheld while the system is in operation and undergoing maintenance and feature release cycles. I have seen large-scale implementations that had to be replaced after only 2 years of being in operation because the software got unmaintainable, slow, and the site feature-set was locked in by technology reasons only (”maintained to hell”). On the other hand, I have built sites that serve over a billion page impressions a month, that have gone through multiple visual redesigns, all on a technology platform that has been in place for 5+ years now.
So, in summary
Heavily involve the business stakeholders throughout the project
Build the system to enable the content editors to efficiently maintain the site content and structure themselves. Any reliance on IT to maintain the content is technically a failure of the project.
Separate content and presentation
Build it to be flexible and customizable, embrace open formats
Establish a clear governance process for content and software release cycles
Establish (and document) clear architectural guidelines and patterns which need to be upheld for maintenance and enhancement after go-live
It’s long been my theory that social media are a great fun tool, can even be used for marketing and promotion, but it still hasn’t figured out how to reliably make money. Actually, only eCommerce and porn are the two reliable moneymakers on the web ;-) That inspite of the fact that social web sites have actually accounted for more traffic than porn on the internet this year so far — first time ever.
Business Week writes a rather interesting article about The Trouble With Twitter:
Twitter’s business model is starting to show. An early sign came in April, when the popular microblogging service launched in Japan and the home page for every Japanese user included a big banner ad in the top right corner.
Then, on Aug. 7, Twitter made another change, this time in the U.S., by limiting the number of people a single user could connect with, or “follow,” to about 2,000. Most recently, on Aug. 14, Twitter made the biggest move yet to slash costs. It killed outbound message delivery to mobile phones via short message, or SMS, in all countries except the U.S., Canada, and India.
Taken together, these moves point to the trouble with Twitter. Investors and marketers have been agog over the potential for Twitter—unlike other social media properties, such as Facebook and MySpace (NWS)—to crack the code, finally, on wringing revenue from millions of users. But the optimists better brace for disappointment.
>> See the Busineess Week site for the full article.
This is a very interesting article about why the video traffic from the Olympics didn’t “melt” the internet. LimeLight (unlike Akamai) actually runs their own backbone which keeps a lot of traffic off the internet:
Avenue A|Razorfish could be up for sale by Microsoft, a spy tells us, possibly to WPP. From the beginning of the relationship, AA|RF has been an odd fit for Microsoft, and based on a few strong indicators, we surmise a sell off before too long.
When you’re spending $6 billion to pick up a company like Redmond, it makes sense to get as much for your money as possible. That seems to be what Microsoft was thinking when they kept AA|RF — but a year later the agency is broadening its horizons, expanding services to “a media and entertainment consulting practice with 200 staffers in New York, L.A. and San Francisco,” according to Silicon Alley Insider.
More after the jump.
Internally, many believe that Microsoft never planned to keep the agency within its roster. For starters, we’ve learned that AA|RF employees haven’t been switched to Microsoft benefits.
Also, the new SF offices are “oddly configured to fit WPP standards, a radical change from the fun, bigger spaces of the old AA/RF office.” I guess you’d have to work at WPP to know exactly what that means — but it sounds as though AA|RF has been told to keep it in its pants if it wants to marry a nice girl one day.
One final oddity, SF based employees were told not to order “new business cards printed with the new office address until future notice.”
Update: I think this is a total joke. They’re enabling the Microsoft key card access in our building next Tuesday :) And, of course, Microsoft has actually upheld their promise to keep us at “arms-length”, i.e. still use whatever technology we see fit for exceeding the client’s needs.
We’ve had a multi-touch Surface device at work for a while now and built a few neat prototypes with it. But this multi-touch emm multi-grab hologram looks way cooler. The demonstration shows a man interacting with holographic images projected before him, moving them around and resizing them. It’s only sort of like the Minority Report display, which used hand movements to control elements on a screen.
You might have read about Cuil, the supposed Google killer which indexes three times as much content as Google does. Too bad it never surfaces anything relevant for me. And have you noticed that the “Search 121,617,892,992 web pages” hasn’t changed in days? Ok, you might guess, they’re not really going to kill Google. Instead I think we’re really re-living some sort of strange bubble at the moment.
First of all, check this out to get an insight into the inner workings of Cuil as a company. That sounds very 1999.
Secondly, working for the largest interactive agency in the world™, I’ve seen a lot of requests for proposals from a lot of companies that all want to build video search portals. That seems to be the next big thing. There are a few cool players out there, Truveo is one of them. Select sites are trying to index the videos by scene detection and voice recognition software in addition to standard metadata.
A lot of players want to build similar portals all of a sudden. Unfortunately there aren’t any really viable off-the-shelf search engine technologies you can buy to do this right. If I look at FAST Search, which is still one of my favorite engines and happens to be owned by Microsoft, they have a multimedia search add-on I want to evaluate soon (yet I’m told not to get my hopes up). I think sophisticated video search portals will be limited to a very few capable players that can invest in the technology themselves and have the proper funding for the R&D and necessary server farm required to parse through all video on the web.
And just to round off the argument, I am surprised at how many of these projects don’t have clear business models (Cuil included). It might be cool, but what’s the point if it doesn’t make money? Just because Google can throw money at 15 technologies to get one out of it that works doesn’t you should.
Anyhow, I think we’re in the middle of a (video) search bubble and it’ll be very interesting to see which players emerge from it as leaders!
About half a year ago I bought an Alix 2C3 embedded system board. It’s got a 500 MHz Geode CPU, 256 MB of RAM, a mini-PCI slot (for a wireless card), 3 network interfaces, and a compact flash slot (CF-card as hard drive). It’s running m0n0wall, a free FreeBSD-based firewall software and is essentially the entry point into my home network. I had looked at other alternatives such as pfsense, yet I found m0n0wall convincingly simple and to the point. And it boots up fast from a 256M flash card.
I used to rely on a Linux box to provide my basic network needs like DHCP and DNS and every time I rebooted the box my network stopped working. This little dedicated box is not running all of it. With the three network interfaces I created LAN, DMZ, and WAN zones. The LAN is hooked up to my Linux server and wireless (for the iMac and laptops), the DMZ is connected to a virtual machine on the Linux server which is basically my public-facing web server (Ubuntu!). The WAN is directly hooked up to the cable modem.
Let’s look at some of the features that have led me come to adore m0n0wall:
Web-based admin interface with user management capabilities
DNS relay
DHCP Server (much more configurable than a standard wireless router)
Firewall and NAT rules (stateful packet filtering)
Traffic Shaper (which I use to throttle the traffic on my public web server)
VPN (PPTP and IPSec) - I just love VPN-ing in to my home network from work
Logs, debugging support, and live traffic graphs
Dynamic DNS integration (e.g. with DynDNS in my case)
