Technology

information & communication technology

Firefox 1.0 – Beginning or End?

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Dan James has a good post on the issues facing the Mozilla Foundation and Firefox as they get ready to launch Firefox 1.0, and deal with success.

Firefox is going to be the first open source project to get mass market adoption. Unlike PHP and Apache people will actually choose to use it. It takes a conscious decision to use Firefox whereas with PHP and Apache average folks use them without knowing. Millions of average people are going to use Firefox. My mom will use it.

I installed Firefox for the rest of my family about two months ago, and it is performing without a hitch. This is truly open source for the masses. We are entering an era of open source for the public that may be the beginnining of something truly revolutionary. If OpenOffice 1.2 has the same ease of use that Firefox 1.0 has, then we may see a much larger adoption of open source for the desktop.

Maritimes Open Source Technologies

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NRC – IIT is sponsoring an afternoon workshop on open source software, that will preceed the Moncton Cybersocial on November 10th. The workshop takes place from 2:00 PM to 4:30 PM at the Universit?ɬ© de Moncton’s Engineering Building [?É‚Ä?difice du g?ɬ©nie], Room 147G-2. All information on the workshop, as well as the Cybersocial will be posted on the new Cybersocial website for the Greater Moncton Knowledge Industry Network.

Speakers include Peter Burtt of the Moncton LUG, William Langley from NRC IRAP, Harold Boley of NRC IIT, Stephen Downes of NRC-IIT eLearning, and Ren?ɬ© Richard & Dr. Keith Wilson of NRC-IIT eHealth. I will be finishing the session with a short panel discussion on open source as a business opportunity. The event is followed by the Cybersocial at the Manhattan Grill and a presentation on open source from David Fellows of Fellows & Carr.

Hope to see you there, and you may want to register (no charge), as the organisers expect all 107 seats to be taken.

Future Business Models

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In many discussions around business model innovation today, three companies are consistently mentioned – Google, Amazon and eBay [no links here, as everyone knows where to find them]. Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, is working on a number of new projects, and if you want to get an indicator of future business models in the digital economy, then consider his areas of concentration:

Since June we have funded efforts in a number of areas:


* Microfinance

* Bottom-up Media

* Open Source

* Intellectual Property

* Voting

* Social Software

The Omidyar Network has some great partners, including Creative Commons and Source Forge.

Via Kathleen.

The Innovation Summit 2004

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AlwaysOn 2004, The Innovation Summit, took place at Stanford University in July of this year, and the sessions are available for free viewing. I took the time to listen to a 56 minute panel discussion on Silicon Valley, Anywhere – featuring venture capitalists and IT executives. I found this to be a frank discussion about the perils of developing and selling new IT products and services in the global marketplace.

Daniel Gatti, CEO of Big Bangwidth, talked about conducting R&D in Canada. To summarize, he said that the centres of excellence developed in Canada are a real boon to technology companies, and that doing development in Canada makes a lot of sense for any IT company.

Joe Schoendorf, of Accel Partners, also made some interesting comments from the VC perspective. He said that if you are introducing a new technology to the market, then you should look at the USA, China and Europe – normally in that order. Europe is slower to adopt new technologies than either the US or China. He also said that the key to innovation is getting products to market, and that as an investor he looks at two things:

  1. The strength of the core team, and
  2. How fast the company will get its product to market

Many people forget that there is only one measurable indicator when it comes to innovation, and that is improving the livelihood of people. If you do not generate wealth from new products and services, then all of the R&D in world is of little value.

There are many other presentations available for viewing, so sit back with a glass of wine (as I did) and listen to the dialogue.

Via Engineering Technologies Canada.

M-Learning from Canada

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Local company, Engage Interactive, is bringing e-learning to handhelds. With its PDA courseware, Engage is looking at expanding its markets:


“We expect our PDA courseware technology to be especially popular outside North America,” said Mr. Heinstein [VP Software Development]. “According to the market firm IDC, China has become the second largest market in the world for handheld computers. Mark Perkins at iBIZ claims the PDA and handheld market is exploding in Europe. And Latin America already has more wireless Internet subscribers than land-based. The market for small wireless internet devices is expected to grow to $73 billion dollars in 2005.”

A demo course, Caring for a Diabetic Patient With Acute Coronary Syndrome is available for viewing.

OpenOffice Celebrates Fourth Birthday

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OpenOffice, the free and open source office application, turned four years old this month. I have been using it for two years, and swear by it. OOo (as it’s referred to) is similar to MS Office, with a word processing application, presentation creator, spreadsheet and HTML editor. With free software, I can insist that my sub-contractors use it, at no additional cost to them. The applications are just as easy to use as Corel’s or Microsoft’s, but there are fewer errors. I have developed +100 page documents in OOo and then exported them as Adobe PDF files (a great feature), without a glitch. OOo files are about 1/5 the size of equivalent MS Word documents, and about 1/3 the size of the same PDF. This makes shipping documents to those on dial-ups a lot easier.

You can download OOo for Windows, Mac or Linux, and try it out to see if you like it. You can also purchase one of several available books, including Open Office for Dummies, if you need a manual.

So here is a free software suite that is compatible with MS Office (you can save as .PPT or .DOC or .XLS ), is easy to use, and is supported by a large user community. You can also purchase support packages from one of several vendors. So what are you waiting for? You have nothing to lose but your upgrade fees.

SmartDraw 7 Released

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I’ve been using the new SmartDraw 7 Suite, and like what I see. I purchased SmartDraw last year when I was looking for a cheaper MS Visio replacement, as I create a lot of diagrams and flowcharts in my business. Version 7 is a significant improvement and the SmartDraw Suite is $200 less than Visio Professional. Like Visio, files can be converted to other formats. SmartDraw allows conversion to JPG, GIF, EPS, PDF, etc.

Open Source Medical Journal

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PLoS [Public Library of Science] Medicine is a peer-reviewed medical journal available free online, with a Creative Commons license for use. Here is one reason why it was created:

Whereas some would argue that medical journals should not be accessible to patients because patients are unable to use the information effectively, we believe it is our responsibility as publishers and members of the medical community not only to give patients access, but to provide them with tools to use the medical literature wisely. Medical research is a partnership between medical scientists and millions of voluntary human participants, conducted largely with public funds. What better way to acknowledge the public’s contribution and ensure their willingness to sponsor and participate in future research than to openly share the product of this research with them?

It could be interesting to examine the differences in usage between PLoS Medicine, which is geared toward both practitioners and the public, with another source built expressly for use by the public, such as the Canadian Health Network.

Free social software sandbox for teachers

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James Farmer is offering a place for teachers to test out social and pedagogical software technologies:

So, by providing free-for-teachers hosting, installation, support and consultation for weblogs, wikis, CMSs and more, I figure I get to learn an enormous amount (which will certainly help me in my career), help some frustrated teachers out and show the light to others who would have a lot of trouble technically getting there. Well worth a few bucks a month I think.

The software suite also includes synchronous tools and discussion boards; and the CMS is Drupal. Go ahead and try it out.