Two of the biggest launches in Rich Internet Application history took place in 2007/2008 when Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in February '08 and Microsoft launched Silverlight (September '07). At the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October SYS-CON Events is delighted to be presenting major industry keynotes from the two industry executives with overall responsibility for both of those massive richer-web initiatives: Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch and Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform.

Progress Software has acquired Mindreef, a provider of SOA service validation and testing tools. Mindreef will be fully integrated into Progress Software, and will adopt the Progress Software company name. Progress expects to retain most Mindreef product names, however, this will be reviewed over the months following the acquisition.

It's important to remember that there is a huge resource being created on the Web these days in terms of both services and content. This includes access to SaaS applications (that are better than their enterprise-bound counterparts), service marketplaces, and even mash-able applications that you can mix and match with other Web 2.0 applications / APIs / services or enterprise applications / services to quickly solve business problems.

AccuRev announced a new AJAX-based Web Interface and a native integration with Microsoft Windows Explorer for its process-centric software change and configuration management (SCCM) solution. These new capabilities make it easy to integrate every knowledge worker into the development process and offer new ways to share information.

The number of subscribers using mobile Internet services will rise from 577 million currently, to top 1.7bn by 2013, spurred by demand for collaborative applications known collectively as 'Web 2.0', and greater 2.5/3G penetration. Established mobile players face increasing competition from web-based brands and will have to adapt their commercial strategies to accommodate greater collaboration with other members of the value chain, if future revenue growth in the mobile Web 2.0 space is to be achieved.

Project Insight has released Project Scorecard, a project scoring system that enables companies to measure projects on how they fit into corporate goals and objectives. With the recent economic downturn, businesses are hard-pressed to prioritize major projects and determine whether or not they meet company strategies.

Curl has made available the newest example of a Curl Nitro 'fit client' application. Designed by Manuel Lima, the founder of VisualComplexity.com, the CurlGraph features a visual representation of the social graph of individual Facebook members. Using the desktop-based application, users can visualize a circle of up to 128 friends from an established Facebook account, enabling them to see relationships and navigate through that friend data to find the information they want.

Jaspersoft announced the availability of its new Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite v3 Professional Edition. Jaspersoft v3 marks a major milestone for open source business intelligence software by providing rich enterprise-class functionality delivered through state-of-the-art interactive Web 2.0 interfaces.

The demand for and widespread usage of popular video sharing sites, communities of interest, social networking and personalization has increased exponentially in the past year. While multimedia services and usage are at all time highs in terms of minutes of use, service providers and content owners are still adjusting their revenue and go-to-market models toward consumers and enterprises.

Over recent years the web has seen the growth of so-called 'Web 2.0' services based around the concept of a two-way information flow, and the empowering of individuals to create and publish their own content and information through blogs, wikis, video sharing, and social networking services. Video content is often central to these services, allowing the uploading and sharing of content generated by customers, along with the emergence of video advertising on the web.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that mashups are moving from things that are conceptual and fun, to things that are productive and businesslike. The fact is, developers are leveraging mashups to solve all sorts of business problems these days, and the speed to production and the value of these little applications is compelling.

IBM announced IBM Mashup Center will be hosted as a free trial on the Web with which non-technical business people can use to experiment and build customized mashups following the success of early corporate adopters Boeing Corporation and Carrefour Group. On schedule for mid-year delivery, the IBM Mashup Center allows business people to create situational applications, or mashups, by remixing information from anywhere to gain business insight and do their jobs smarter and more effectively. Using IBM's mashup technology, even non-technical users will be able to exploit standards and Web-based technology to gain access to myriad information, such as Web sites and feeds, spreadsheets, databases, applications, unstructured text from an email, video, audio and other information on the Web, and make sense of it all in minutes.

When picturing the relationship between the enterprise and the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model, imagine an evolutionary process that can be divided into three main stages: 'The Comfort Zone,' 'The Enlightenment,' and 'The Re-Assessment.' Once we examine these, we can then decide on the right course of action when choosing how to adapt to the IT demands of the enterprise.

IBM announced it will establish the first Cloud Computing Center for software companies in China, which will be situated at the new Wuxi Tai Hu New Town Science and Education Industrial Park in Wuxi, China. The center will offer emerging Chinese software companies the ability to tap into a virtual computing environment to support their development activities. It will be established through an agreement signed today between IBM and Wuxi Tai Lake Industry Investment and Development Company Limited.

'While the last decade was focused on the Web, the next phase in the evolution of our industry will be on the convergence of Web, mobile and desktop applications and the ability to extend existing applications with these new technologies for a consistent user experience regardless of how and where the information is viewed,' says newly appointed Nexaweb CTO Jeremy Chone in this Exclusive Q&A with SYS-CON Media's Jeremy Geelan.

Reminding people of how its backing was the making of Linux, IBM, to no one's surprise, has thrown its support behind cloud computing, that delicious nexus of every chi-chi buzzword technology currently in vogue: Web 2.0, rich Internet applications, software-as-a-service, SOA, grid computing, Web Services, virtualization and utility computing. IBM calls its initiative Blue Cloud - like it could have another name - and claims it's a 'game-changing model for Internet-scale computing,' providing customer with just the right size computer power while at one and the same time being 'green' as well as 'self-healing and self-managing' based on open standards and Linux. Lordy, if this thing was a cute guy with money, it would be every mother's dream.

This is a checklist of items you need for an all-encompassing personal branding strategy. Personal branding is the process of marketing and selling yourself as a brand in order to gain success in business. Personal branding is a continual process just as knowing yourself is a continual process. As you grow, so does your brand. The need for personal branding arises from the fact that globalization has increased competition in the workplace. As the wheat is separated from the chaff, if you are left standing, you are left standing with others of good caliber. The playing field is now that much more challenging since your competition is as good as, or better, than you.

BigSpeed Computing announced the release of BigSpeed Secure Socket Library 3.0. BigSpeed Secure Socket Library is an ActiveX control that simplifies and accelerates the development of proprietary communication solutions over the Internet. It implements a flexible message-oriented protocol on top of a single TCP connection with on-the-fly data scrambling.

All new or emerging businesses are rightfully cautious of the big investment required to launch a successful web presence. A new cost-effective and time-saving service enables companies to fast track their strategic and tactical web initiatives while still actively growing their user base. Unlike past methods of web development, rapid prototyping is a back-to-front development process that allows the product user interface to be fully designed before writing any code.

TopQuadrant has announced the general availability of TopBraid Live 2.0, a semantic application deployment platform that simplifies the creation of web services to a 'click and connect' process. Users can connect data from RDF stores, relational databases, spreadsheets, email, RSS feeds, as well as data in HTML and XML formats, without the need to understand programming languages. A new Flex API creates graphical 'information spaces' as the output, which allow users to browse dynamic information by following graphical links.

Research and Markets has announced the addition of 'Web 2.0 Server and Push Technology Market Shares Strategies, and Forecasts, 2008 to 2014' to their offering. Advertising budgets have not been directly connected to the computer and technology before the Web 2.0 companies started attracting advertising dollars. The massive reach of Google has attracted to advertising dollars into the computer industry. Even thought the proportion of total advertising spending on Internet advertising is relatively low, the impact on the computer industry is large.

Force10 Networks announced that Etsy has deployed the TeraScale E-Series family of switch/routers and the S-Series family of access switches to increase the performance and reliability of its online marketplace for handmade arts and crafts. The scalability and resiliency of the Force10 solution enables Etsy to support millions of customer page views and transactions while providing the capability to seamlessly expand as more than 50,000 new buyers join the marketplace each month.

Adobe Thursday turned its little piece of Disneyland for developers loose. The pre-release of Flash Player 10, a k a 'Astro,' which promises richer, more immersive Web 2.0 experiences, has gone to public beta ahead of general availability sometime later this year. It adds custom filters and effects, native 3D transformation and animation, extensible rich text layout and GPU hardware acceleration. Adobe thinks it's a game changer about what can go on the web.

Zapatec introduced the Zapatec AJAX E-mail Client, the second in a series of self-contained modules designed for integration into Web 2.0 applications. Zapatec's AJAX E-mail Client enables developers to add needed web-based e-mail functionality to their applications, freeing them to focus on their core business.

Infragistics announced the availability of Infragistics NetAdvantage for JSF 2008 Volume 1 enabling web developers to leverage the power of JavaServer Faces to create compelling User Interfaces (UI). This new release provides a comprehensive package of AJAX-enabled JSF UI components for building commercial Web 2.0 applications in J2EE environments. With the ability to create re-useable components, NetAdvantage for JSF 2008 Volume 1 helps Java enterprise developers create consistent experiences with less code in less time.

frevvo announced Live Forms software which enables users and developers to easily create rich AJAX forms with built-in business capabilities. Live Forms provides a complete Web-based design experience that can be embedded into any application and is ideal for Enterprise Social Software companies, BPM/SOA vendors, Web hosting providers and solution providers.

ShoZu announced that it has expanded its mobile social media service to Photobucket, Dailymotion, Friendster, Twitter and four additional Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 communities. With these eight new integrations, ShoZu now enables mobile users to interact with their choice of 36 social networks from a single screen on their handsets - reducing the time, effort and money required to upload images, update social profiles and check friends' latest posts from the phone.

Building on its November 2007 preview, Oracle previewed additional planned feature enhancements of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g. Based on feedback resulting from close cooperation with customers testing in real-world environments, the latest preview of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g includes planned features intended to provide Java developers with a unified design and development experience based on new open standards for Java, SOA, AJAX, Web 2.0 and Security and to help reduce the time, effort and cost of developing Rich Enterprise, Web and mobile applications.

A Philippines-based Web 2.0 start-up called Morph Labs thinks its cloud can rain on Google's newfangled App Engine. Morph Labs was founded by Winston Damarillo, the guy who did Gluecode, the only open source company IBM ever bought, a move made to protect its precious WebSphere franchise. The start-up claims to have done all the back-end cutwork to make it easy for developers to get their software up and running as a service on Amazon?s Web Services (AWS), freeing them from Google's Microsoft-like vendor lock-in.

Artech launched GeneXus X, the tenth GeneXus version, designed to expand the business opportunities of companies. GeneXus X incorporates new tools aimed at increasing the productivity of the work team and facilitate the rapid generation of corporate Web 2.0 applications.

As the Internet's newest way to connect brands with consumers, widgets have officially arrived. These portable applets appear on blogs, websites, and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. Offered by third-party developers as embedded Flash (.swf) objects, the self-contained badges allow page owners to personalize their sites with photo slide shows, music playlists, games, and other content.

HCL Technologies announced the launch of its new SaaS Service Delivery Platform (SDP) AGORA. Service disruption and Web 2.0 have resulted in a sudden outburst of participation by the user and developer communities. This, along with increasing collaboration between independent service providers, communications service providers, application service providers and content service providers have resulted in the service value chain becoming larger.

You remember back in the early days of video games when there wasn't enough capacity on the carts themselves to support 30 hours of gameplay? What was the solution to keep you playing? They made the games unbelievably freaking difficult. Try playing Kid Icarus now after having played a modern game and you'll see that the game introduces artificial barriers and creates needless blocks simply to increase the amount of time spent in the game. If you're an MMO maker and you charge a monthly fee, the more time people spend in your game the more money you make.

IBM introduced t a new category of server designed to address the technology needs of companies that use Web 2.0-style computing to operate massive data centers with tens of thousands of servers. Companies that operate massive scale-out data centers spend 10 to 30 times more on energy costs per square foot than a typical office building. The energy powers both hundreds of thousands of servers and the air conditioning needed to cool them. The growth of such data centers will continue as streaming video, online gaming and social networks spike Internet traffic, requiring companies to build ever vaster pools of computers that devour energy resources to operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Force10 Networks announced its enterprise switching technology will support IBM's iDataPlex. iDataPlex more than doubles the number of systems that can run in a single rack while using 40 percent less power and will be aided by the high density and robust functionality of Force10's Ethernet switches.

GoGrid announced the availability of GoGrid's QuickStart Facebook servers, which allow businesses to build and deploy Facebook applications. The QuickStart Facebook Server automates and speeds up the Facebook application setup process, enabling Facebook developers to create, integrate, host and scale Facebook applications. By using a GoGrid QuickStart Facebook Server, both ASP.NET and Linux developers and systems administrators are now able to roll out Facebook-enabled servers in under 5 minutes, and when user adoption of their Facebook application increases, individual GoGrid QuickStart Facebook Servers can be scaled into load balanced server networks.

According to research firm Gartner, more than 30% of Global 2000 organizations will enter a new era of end-user computing via user-assembled, composite applications created with enterprise mashup environments by 2010. Against this background IBM has launched its IBM Mashup Center Product, powered by intuitive user mashup capabilities from Lotus Mashups, and information access and transformation capabilities provided IBM InfoSphere MashupHub.

Ben Worthen of the Wall Street Journal recently posted an entry about Web 2.0 adoption. He cited a Forrester survey that concluded Enterprise Web 2.0 solutions would gain broad adoption in 2008 despite clear CIO resistance to the siren call of blogs and wikis. Open source technologies like Spring and WaveMaker build unstoppable momentum within the IT organization by solving fundamental problems that much bigger players either cannot or will not solve.

Pizza.com sold recently for $2.6M, and vodka.com for $3M. Domain names are now a global business. The explosive growth in online advertising has seen Internet entrepreneurs earn millions of dollars by buying, selling, developing and monetizing web addresses, or domain names. There are now over 1,000 so-called 'domainers' (as domain owners refer to themselves), as many as 100 million registered domains, and a thriving aftermarket for domain names, with reported sales exceeding US$700M in 2007.