Kapow energizes mashups
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(InfoWorld) - Kapow Technologies will announce on Tuesday general availability of Kapow Mashup Server 6.2, featuring access to RSS and ATOM feeds in the building of mashup applications. The product features a set of technologies enabling users to collect and mash content from the Web as well as corporate intranets. New in version 6.2 is the ability to define RSS and ATOM feeds for any Web site or intranet so they can be used in a mashup, said Joe Keller, Kapow chief marketing officer and a former vice president at Sun Microsystems. RSS and ATOM join industry-standard APIs such as SOAP and REST that can be used to access data sources. Mashups, which piece together applications out of Web content, are becoming enterprise-ready, Keller said. "I think the impact [of mashups] is they're moving into the enterprise and helping deliver applications in a fraction of the time and the cost that it takes to do it with other methods," he said. Currently, the number of Web sites available to mashup makers is very limited, Keller said. Out of 108 million Web sites, there are only 374 APIs for building mashups, said Keller, citing industry figures. Kapow seeks to improve this situation. "There's a long way to go to make all of the Web available to mashup builders," he said. Mashup Server supports Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and Ruby and re-purposes Web-based application components into data access APIs. This is done using point-and-click techniques. With the product, data or content can be accessed from any browser-enabled application or Web site. Mashup Server has been used to build mashups for functions such as SOA enablement and content management system and portal integrations. Momondo.com, a European-based Web site for travelers, uses Mashup Server for a vertical search engine to comb the Web for flight prices. "The reason we built it was around 2004, our clients, which are business travel agencies, were having a problem with the Internet fares," said Thorvald Stigsen, CEO of Momondo. "They used booking sites or booking engines, which donât have access to all the low-cost carriers. So we selected the Kapow platform and developed a number of robots that scanned all the low-cost carrier sites in Europe and beyond." Currently, Momondo researches 246 sites using Kapow's technology. "The speed is very impressive," Stigsen said. Momondo has faced a challenge with JavaScript, through which different airlines made it difficult to scrape their pages. But Version 6.2 fixes some of the issues related to JavaScript execution, Stigsen said. Also new in the release is improved Web-clipping capabilities for Web pages that use JavaScript and Flash. Web clipping involves the ability to clip a piece of a page. Another addition in Version 6.2 is full support for the Firefox browser. New methods to collect content from Excel spreadsheets are featured as well.
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Tycho:  After seeing Chore Wars mentioned yesterday, the opportunities for manipulating people seemed...  rich.  The possibilities for mashups based on this data are also rich - I wonder if it could be exposed, somehow.  When my charge is old enough to manipulate in this way, my crib is going to fucking sparkle.
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Latest addition to the Zoho suite of online applications lets users aggregate text, audio, video and images.
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An open-source application for Mac OS X encodes music using just about any audio file format imaginable. In Monkey Bites.
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KOMOTION, Inc., the makers of the popular, award-winning Web Gallery Wizard(TM), today announced Shozam(TM) Web gallery generator which automatically creates full-featured Web galleries to showcase digital media.
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The race for the best mash-up builder picks up as Microsoft opens up Popfly at the Web 2.0 Summit.
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Adobe and MuleSource tune open source assault Radio Reg MacWorld, MacWorld, MacWorld. Let those proprietary clowns play with their toys and false idols. We'll stick with open source decency - thank you very much - and dish out Episode 9 of Open Season.â¦
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Attendees at this year's PHP UK Conference were able to listen to Cal Evans' talk about mashups in PHP - now everyone can check out his slides:   Ok after procrastinating a week, I've finally gotten around to posting my slides and sample code for my presentation at PHPUK, "My First Mashup".   He has the file offered in both a zip format and in a tarball.
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Keep an eye on Shuffle Master, but don't ante up just yet.
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InfoWorld - Raising the stakes in the burgeoning mashup development tools field, JackBe is unveiling Presto Wires, a visual enterprise mashup composer, at the AJAXWorld conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Monday.
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Innovative new features are designed to attract casual players looking for a few minutes of fun.
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(InfoWorld) - Raising the stakes in the burgeoning mashup development tools field, JackBe is unveiling Presto Wires, a visual enterprise mashup composer, at the AJAXWorld conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Monday. The tool functions with the company's Presto Edge mashup server, which offers secure access to disparate data and services. Users of Presto Wires, who would be business analysts as well as developers, can integrate Web services via a drag-and-drop workflow. These could be services based on REST, WSDL, RSS, and SOAP as well as services produced from SOA infrastructure. Services can be gathered from such sources as RSS feeds, maps from Google, and research data. "[Presto Wires] gives enterprise users the ability to mash these different Web services together with minimal or no support from IT [and] with all the security and governance that larger enterprises expect," Chor-Ching Fan, vice president of product management at JackBe, said. JackBe defines mashups as applications integrating two or more data services and allowing users to specify how the data is mashed up, such as stipulating how columns of data are to be joined. "The main benefit [of mashups] is to allow business units to solve ad hoc business issues," said Fan. Presto Wires can access public Web services and integrate them with internal data sources to look for business opportunities. Presto Wires allows enterprises, including business units and non-technical people, to leverage SOA investments and combine data sets and business rules, according to JackBe. "Many enterprises have made major investments into SOA, and they cannot deliver the value and benefits of SOA without allowing the business units to do mashups on their own," Fan said. "Presto is providing the way that business users can take advantage of the SOA investments," made in the past five to 10 years, he said. An analyst compared Presto Wires to a Yahoo technology. "JackBe's Presto Wires resembles data mashup construction environments like Yahoo Pipes, which is focused on the consumer Web space," said analyst Vishwanath Venugopalan of The 451 Group. "Yahoo Pipes operates almost entirely on syndicated Internet data feeds (RSS, Atom, etc.) Presto Wires offers business users a chance to expand the scope of these data mashups to traditional enterprise data sources such as spreadsheets and Web services." While JackBe leverages AJAX to provide for more intuitive, user-friendly mashup creation, no programming is required. Users can drag and drop objects. Presto Wires carries a list price of $40,000 per CPU.
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IBM Corp is lifting the covers on an experimental enterprise mashup technology built around a Wiki engine, and offering it on a hosted basis on its alphaWorks developer site.
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Here's a screen shot of the HTML source.  Looks like it's trying to serve some kind of ActiveX control. Happy to be using a Mac.  PS: Scoble just showed up and TM works on his cell phone so there's something weird going on.
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New widgets help personalize maps with dynamic content from diverse sources.
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Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls... It's with much anticipation that I say this. I have a new product that may be familiar to those of you who used Radio 8, and in other ways may be completely new.  The idea is simple.  There's a convergence between big screen high-definition televisions, and photography as an Internet based activity. The purpose of this product is to smooth that convergence, to make it easy to set up a connection between the Internet and your television. To allow photography to come into your living room in new, powerful and easy ways. Think of it as the networked living room and you'll understand the vision. Some of the work I've done is technical, some is user interface, and some is working with media organizations to try to create a comfort level, or at least a spirit of Let's Give This A Try. In the latter case, it's much like working with the NY Times to get their news headlines and summaries to flow through Radio's RSS aggregator in 2002. Only this time we're working with photographs, and we think, the best news photographers in the world. And the pictures are beautifully high-def, they look really great when displayed on LCD and plasma screens. I use it with my 52-inch Samsung and 46-inch Sony. Of course what looks great on a wall, also looks great on a 15-inch Macbook or 24-inch iMac.   And while we connect those pros with your TV, it's equally important that we connect your friends and families too. One of the early testers found the pictures that Doc Searls uploads to Flickr a great revelation. Me too. That's because Doc is not only a great photographer, he's also a great story-teller. I find that I can follow the lives of far more friends visually than I can through text messages (which I love to do too!). Viewing great photos on bigscreen TVs, desktops and laptops -- that's one focus, but not the only one.  I wanted to provide a complete two-way tool for people who love Flickr, as I do.  Why Flickr? Well, they've got this great thing called an API. It makes it possible for people like me to make software that runs on a desktop computer that does things like automatically backing up your new photos every night, and providing a drop-folder on your desktop for quick uploads. (It understands tags too, it's incredibly simple.) We also made it easy to post pictures you like to Twitter. Why Twitter? It's that API thing again. They made it easy for us to love them. I wish more network service developers understood how powerful this outstretched hand is.  But that's not all! Not by a long shot. The reason all this will be so familiar to Radio 8 users is that it builds on the same engine, the one that was released as open source in 2004. So I've been working on other tools to drop into this base platform and once we have a good-sized base of people using it for "really simple photos" on the desktop, there will be other tools. And because it's an open platform, other developers can do the same. Not saying they will, but they can.  Anyway, I'm in the last stages, preparing the download site, and a FAQ, and tweaking the installer. One caveat, the first beta release is Mac only. That's because I'm doing all my work on the Mac, and this is a one-man show. Later we will work it out for Windows too, and with a bit more work and a bit more luck, for Linux.  It should be ready before the sun goes down today.
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In this new post from the splitbrain.org website (creators of the Dokuwiki application), there's an example of how to join wav files together with PHP with a quick and easy script.   I'm currently working on a CAPTCHA plugin for DokuWiki and thought about providing audio output for users not able to see the image. This is pretty simple for CAPTCHAs - there is no need for complicated speech synthesis because you only need recordings of the 26 possible letters. But you need a way of joining those recordings on the fly...   There was an example he found previously, but it seemed like overkill, so he rolled together his own solution - a 24 line script that takes in the filenames of the wav files and spits back out the joined resource. This functionality has already been added to the CAPTCHA plugin if you'd like to check it out.