October 17, 2003

Hybrid Application Manager

AppRocket seems to be a hybrid application manager with “intelligent search” that appears to be based on LaunchBar for Mac OS X. (link via Les Orchard)

“AppRocket uses a very special search algorithm to zip through thousands of items and only show you that which is most relevant.”

Just a note however, AppRocket requires .Net 1.1.

October 16, 2003

Is Comment Spam Cost Effective?

I’m getting my fair share of comment spam like many other bloggers, but I can’t imagine that the cost/time ratio is actually worth it.

I think Sam Ruby sums it up best:

“65 minutes to create. Carefully crafted to appear to be on topic. 10 seconds to wipe out.”

LOL! Dumb asses!

October 15, 2003

What is WinFS?

J. Wilcox over at Microsoft Monitor tries to determine if the new file system, dubbed WinFS, in Microsoft’s NG:OS Longhorn, will indeed be considered “new“:

“If Mr. LaMonica’s WinFS description is accurate, then WinFS really is Microsoft database technology running on top of the existing NTFS file system.”

October 15, 2003

Salesforce.com on Social Networking

Ross Mayfield posted an excerpt from an interview with the CSO of Salesforce.com in regard to Social Networking. The interview was conducted by IBDN, but I wasn’t able to find a direct link. However, here’s a quote from the M2M blog:

IBDN: We know that consumers will pay to find a date, but will they pay to find business contacts?

FULBRIGHT: Yes, one name for them is “leads,” and sales and marketing organizations pay thousands of dollars for leads today. Leads are the life-blood of every business. Another type of paid business contact is called “candidates,” and again companies have been paying recruiters or internal referrals thousands of dollars for great candidates for at least 50 years.

October 14, 2003

NYC Subway RSS Feeds

Heh, RobotPolishers’ has created RSS feeds of MTA’s services updates for the NYC Subway over at Disorient Express:

“So out of frustration, sheer geekiness and a desire to toy around with RSS, I decided to put together some feeds of the MTAs service updates, based on a program scanning their own weekly website updates.”

October 10, 2003

Jahia: Integrated Java CMS and Portal

I had a chance to take a look at the new 4.0 version of Jahia and I must say that I am very impressed. As 100% Java solution, it’s a competitive alternative to SharePoint.

Jahia is not quite Open Source however, you do get the source code, but the license model is “Jahia Collaborative Source License (JCSL)”, which roughly means that you can either pay for the license in dollars or pay with code contributions to the project. Certainly an interesting model that is similar to Sun Collaborative Source License (SCSL).

October 8, 2003

Search Engine for Research Documents

Penn State University has released a new search engine called SMEALSearch, which is focused on indexing academic and business white papers, articles and reports.

“SMEALSearch is a niche search engine that searches the web and catalogs academic articles as well as commercially produced articles and reports that address any branch of Business. The search engine crawls websites of universities, commercial organizations, research institutes and government departments to retrieve academic articles, working papers, white papers, consulting reports, magazine articles, and published statistics and facts.”

October 2, 2003

Collaborative Search

Unfortunately, I haven’t been using any IM clients recently due to the fact that their usage is banned and blocked where I work (more on that sometime).

Anyway, it was intriguing to read via Jeremy Zawodny Blog about Yahoo’s new IMVironment (e.g. plug-in) for its Messenger client that allows users to search collaboratively.

“Pull up a map or yellow pages listing together instantly. Working with a colleague in another city? Search together in real time for info, images, news…”

October 1, 2003

Email-2-RSS

I’ve actually been thinking of cobbling together a similar service that I could use to aggregate all of my various POP3 and Web-based email accounts as RSS feeds, which I could then read via NewsGator in Outlook.

I know- I know this sounds convoluted, but this idea was basically spurred because POP3, IMAP and many web-based mail services have been blocked via the corporate firewall here where I work, which has been instituted because of the rash email-based worms and of course the abundance of spam.

September 30, 2003

Google acquires Kaltix

Well, that was quick… Here’s quote via San Jose Biz Journal

“Kaltix Corp., a search technology startup, has been purchased by Internet search engine company Google Inc., of Mountain View. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.”

(Thanks for the heads-up Anil.)

I posted something about this back in August, but based on their “published research that claims to offer a way to compute search results nearly 1,000 times faster than what’s possible using current methods”, it seems like a smart move for Google.