Business
Universal Desktop Daily - Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Wal-Mart uses OpenLaszlo for their store, Brightcove jumps into free video sharing, a different take on Rich Internet Applications, the Oracle and Adobe partnership, try Flex in your browser, and a lengthly list of WPF blogs.
New Items
- Wal-Mart goes Rich Internet Application with OpenLaszlo. This is awesome. Wal-Mart has redone parts of their website using OpenLaszlo in order to leverage "rich media to give customers content in places to make it easier for them to shop". Companies are seeing the benefit of implementing a customer-facing RIA strategy. Nike.com made the jump, and now Walmart. Now we have to see if these improvements provide a return on the investment.
- Brightcove announces free video sharing site. I'm excited about this. Brightcove's business model is solid, and they have a lot of good partnership deals including AOL video, Tivo, and Yahoo. Combine that with the fact that they have some smart guys running the show, and this could be a big player in the crowded video space.
- I always like to hear different takes on Rich Internet Applications, and there is a good one over on Graphically Speaking. "Whether its Flash, AJAX, WPF, OS X, etc. - haven't really seen any new interaction paradigms (that aren't fun, but useless) - it just looks prettier;". He makes an interesting point, and I think this is going to change. When people see what kinds of things RIAs can enable, they're going to get even more excited about the web. Developers just need to show the stuff off.
- Oracle and Adobe are partnering up to combine Flash charting with Ajax content for the enterprise. Combine this with the Adobe's SAP partnership and Flash is starting to get more of a footprint in the enterprise world.
- Try coding Flex right from your web browser. A cool demo from Adobe that allows you to write and test out Flex by coding it in the form then rendering it when you push submit. We've seen this kind of thing with JavaScript and HTML so it's good to see Flex get the same treatment.
- Good list of WPF blogs. As the author notes, some of them are updated infrequently, but I subscribe to most of them and when the content is there, it's very good. The list is a good resource for developers.