First of all, I bought my own copy of Flash™ CS4™ and I’ve been working with Flash since it was called FutureSplash, in the heady days of Macromedia Director, so I’m allowed to say this: I have no need for Flash (mobile or desktop) and neither do you. Let’s look at why that is, and how Adobe could change my mind in time for the next release of the Flash IDE.

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Shrinking Technology, Growing Complexity, and the Missing Link Between Complex Resources and Simple Productivity

In the beginning, was the big wooden desk. Information went in the desk. You sat at the desk. Business grew slowly.

Then came the big plastic PC. Information went into the PC. You sat in front of the PC. Business grew quickly.

The PCs got smaller, information became chaotic, fast and aggressive. You sat underneath the PC. Business grew confusing.

Then came the BlackBerry®. Small. To the point. Elegant. It reintroduced us to filtered, purposeful information. Business grew focused.

So what's next? Come see! Come see what's next for the platform that's given companies a 238% ROI and/or a 154 day payback on investment. RIM and Kryos invite you to learn more about what's possible for companies with a vision to extend the reach, power and potential of your existing IT investments, through the power of the condensed technology already in your team's pockets.

The BlackBerry Revolution

February 26th, 7:30 - 9:30 AM in the Willow Room of the Sheraton Hotel, Eau Claire (Calgary, AB).

Agenda (7:30-9:30):

• Breakfast & registration.
• Presentation by RIM's Patrick McElrea.
• Live demonstration of a back-office system and IBM Collaboration Tools being extended to the BlackBerry.
• Quick overview of the business case for expanding your professional teams' access to mobile power.
• Door prize draw for a BlackBerry® Bold™.

Space is limited, click here to jump to Kryos' online RSVP.

See you there!

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Again this year we were honoured to be selected to present in the Application Development track at Lotusphere in Orlando, Florida. If you are interested in how Notes 8 can be used to dramatically improve your current applications, come see our presentation. The organizers are expecting a lot of interest, so a repeat session is scheduled; time and locations are:

Monday, Jan. 19  5:00 - 6:00 pm   DL S. Hemisphere III
Tuesday, Jan. 20 8:30 - 9:30 am  Swan 5-6

The demonstration application is based on work that we're doing with one of our innovative Canadian clients.

Session details are here: https://www-950.ibm.com/events/wwe/lotus/lsph2009.nsf/sessionabstract?openform&sessionid=AD211

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It seems like forever since I've put a blog out which is almost the case. I've been hiding under my rock working on the Kryos product line. We decided over a year ago to start targeting the agriculture vertical, developing customer portals for Grain Handlers which we are calling GrainWaves. This was a logical place to start considering we have a deep history in portals, have done a bunch of work in the Agriculture space and have many people on the team who grew up in rural Saskatchewan with intimate knowledge of the industry.

A funny thing happened on the way to building the product. The plan for GrainWaves was to have a Java portal web based version and mobile blackberry version. While building GrainWaves we built foundational portal components to provide flexibility and rapid development leveraging open source components such as Spring and Hibernate to their fullest extent. Out of that we realized, there's a product of it's own for this foundation which we are calling Competitive Advantage Portal or CAP which we are taking to market.

Then we started on the BlackBerry component. We've done lots of BlackBerry development in the past, using the BlackBerry browser, MDS Studio and custom thick client applications. We didn't like the limitations of browser applications or MDS Studio applications but also didn't like the time and effort required to build custom Java thick client applications using the native API. Trying to think of a better way, we developed a custom viewer on the device that can take in XML from the server and display custom a UI using the Java thick client. This turned into something really interesting. Along the way we developed offline caching capabilities, push functionality, remote administration capabilities, etc, etc. What started out being a quicker way for us to build our GrainWaves BlackBerry applications has turned into a robust platform on the BlackBerry with which we can deploy new applications of virtually any type without writing a single line of BlackBerry code, just server side code to send the appropriate XML down to the client. We are now taking this product to market as Competitive Advantage Portal - mobile or CAPm.

So what started out as a single product has turned into 3 products. I'll post more information about the products but that's a quick overview of why I haven't been blogging lately.

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As many of you have probably noticed, the Blackberry development team has been slowly moving from proprietary IDEs to the plug-in model for Eclipse and Microsoft Visual Studio.

I'm not going to pretend like I know anything about the Visual Studio plug-ins but I did get a chance to play with MDS studio 2.0 beta plug-in for Eclipse.

The first order of business was to convert existing applications to 2.0 which ended up being quite the chore.

More after the break...

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Ok, ok. It's been 11 months since I put up a blog post and frankly, its about time it gets off my todo list. Here is a good reason to write something... An interesting thing happened to me this week as I filed through my regular smattering of news feeds on what my customers are up to. I feel as CEO it's my job to keep abreast of our customers -- and one way I do that is by watching the public companies closely via news services. While many of our customers are not public -- for the ones that are there is a wealth of information available that allows us to serve them better. So this week I saw the little newsfeed alert that indicated that Ritchie Brothers had some news they were talking about. I was very excited by what I saw.

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Chiconomics:

This is essentially Appendix A to the post on "Marketing and Open vs. Closed"

Fashion and the black art of belonging are Closed©.

There are groups you must golf with even if a crowd-sourced free game of ultimate frisbee would be just as fun and better for you. If you could open one of your many Cultures' cases you'd find a shocking number of soldered-in parts and non-upgradeable ROM chips.

Read more about Chiconomics after the break.

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Open™ works. Open™ is wonderful. I get Open™.

I love how easy it was to hack-update the Calgary Springbank airport in my X-Plane flight simulator (to reflect the 2,000 foot lengthening of runway 16/34).

I have hundreds of community-built add-ons for my workaday software.

I'm about to post a tutorial on how to tweak your janky type 3057 turn signal bulbs for longer life, using 3M metal foil tape.

Having said all that, Open™ isn't a prerequisite (or a barrier) for success. You're surrounded by lots of successful Closed© platforms. (We can look at the psychology of Why® in another post.)

More on successful Closed© platforms. after the break.

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From Hitwise Intelligence (January 2008):

“A year ago, MapQuest had more than five times (429%) more US visits than Google Maps. Last week, that gap was down to 126%. Google Maps is the #2 Maps website and attracted 22% of visits to Maps websites… Traffic to MapQuest has remained flat year on year and is down 20% in the past 6 months. Google Maps traffic is up 135% year on year and is up 7% in the past 6 months.”

The difference between Mapquest and Google Maps has everything to do with the input Google collected as they imagined release 12.0 of Google Maps, while coding release the alpha release of Google Maps. Mapquest smartly built a product for some of some of us. Google wisely architected a product for all of some of us.

More after the break.

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We're continuing to provide more ways to build easy-to-use, great looking web sites which leverage all of the strengths of Lotus Domino's architecture. In version 4, which is now available, we have added "Web 2.0" features, design wizards to change the look of your site without any coding, and faster, more direct content editing and administration.

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