Are people like me being too pushy?

I just came across this post in Digg.com which lead me to the blog post behind it and I had to sit back and ask myself - "Are people like me being to pushy?" I mean I think the concept of Office 2.0 as currently defined is good and I have some of my own thoughts on what that means for the future. However, in our overzealous nature to promote the concept are we giving off the wrong vibe? Are we giving people the impression that no desktop, no local apps is the way of the future?

I'm seriously going to have to go through all of my posts and look to see if I am giving off that vibe and I will have to then do an atitude adjustment, yes I love the idea that I have nothing on my local PC and I can switch between Windows or Linux without thinking twice about it, but I also like choice and for example when I am doing my audiocasting I have the choice of recording right away online with Odeo or locally with Audacity, or if I had a MAC I would probably use Garageband most of the time.

So yes I think it's time to sit down and give my thoughts about Office 2.0 a thorough going through and really define what "I" think it is...



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Finally I can query better

It was with great pleasure that I logged into my Zoho Creator today and found not only a new login screen which I think indicates finally the move to the same UI across the Zoho Apps but also that the next update was in place.

Be great if the folks over there were using the roadmap a bit more but I won't complain about that today instead I will rejoice with the fact that I can finally query better!



When I first setup one of my apps I needed to be able to drill down not only by week but also by day but that ability with the Date field just did not exist so I added two fields manually for this person and keyed in the numbers 1 to 52 for weeks and 1 to 7 for days this worked perfectly by the way but it was not as clean as I wanted.

The recent update seems to have given me a lot more flexibility with the date field now. Great going Zoho!

SAP Facts (Chuck Norris Style) contest has a winner

At the SAP Developer Network there has been an ongoing contest on who could write a www.chucknorrisfacts.com-like fact about SAP, and now the winner has been announced.
Who won? I can only tell that "Chuck Norris uses SAP to keep track of his death count" came in on a shared second place. See also http://sapfacts.elsewhat.com

It's cool when you see members of a community you are an evangelist for going out there on a limb and doing cool little things like this to add a bit of fun to an otherwise more "professional" style environment! Way to go Dagfinn awesome job!


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Dedicated broadcasting of start-ups

"ZBIZ.TV is dedicated to broadcasting weekly interviews with entrepreneurs from early stage companies." - Low budget, but nice idea and lots of potential I think in terms bringing decent videocasting into the mainstream, format (especially sound) needs work but overall I would recommend checking it out and sending in suggestions for future segment

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Blip.tv - my new favorite

I just posted about trying out Blip.tv and basically how I had thought about it initially. Well I'm always looking for a way to combine services to prevent me from using multiple ones for similiar things. Well the result of that blog was an email from Justin over at Blip.tv letting me know about the little login error I had and why; very cool of him to take the time! I also received a comment from Mike Hudack, who happens to be the CEO and Co-Founder (very cool of you to take the time) letting me know that their purpose is to reach out to your audience and if I was looking for a place for a selective or private audience their service just might not be for me.

Well I had even said that Videocasting/Videoblogging might not be for me but then the ScobleShow launched and I caught this video blog from Tango Diva. At that point I realized that I do want to do some videocasting and therefore Blip.tv is my new home. I got the impression they know they have a cool service and had no problems giving me an honest answer about the whole thing.

He also said,

If, on the other hand, you're interested in starting a "show" or some other form of public broadcasting, I think you'll find that blip.tv is uniquely suited for the purpose. Please let me know if you'd like to do this and know that you'll have the full support of the entire blip.tv organization in doing so :)

So I've made some decision over the last several hours. Basically I now have 4 services I use for video content.

• Sharkle.com - Private video content to share with my family and friends
  
• Jumpcut.com - Let's me upload video content and photos and actually edit everything together to create a new video (helps when I am on the road for working with video) - be very cool if I could actually send the edited videos to Blip.tv though
  
• Blip.tv - My platform for my new up and coming Video Blog
  
• Flixin.com - which lets me record video from my cam directly onto the net again be cool if I could then send the video into Blip.tv
  

Now my new video blog will be about SAP technologies and some of the great people that I meet and work with on SDN, I already have competition with places like Podtech.net and SAP themselves and SDN TV (which I do a lot of content for) but I think I will be able to provide a different angle and theme for "Craigster's Views" (WIP).

The Education system and Web 2.0

The other day I posted about how Zoho was calling out to the Educators in the world, and Nigel responded with a cool link to Kid Safe and then I came across an article talking about MySpace educating parents.

So how come more Web 2.0 companies, or just any company associated with the net are not stepping up to help educate parents, kids, teachers, well basically just the general population to the dangers out there?

New tech video show from Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble, former strategist on Microsoft's evangelism team (he did the Channel 9 video blog there) now has his own video show, www.scobleshow.com, where he interviews people like Sun Microsystems' CEO Jonathan Schwartz, Printing for Less CEO Andrew Field, JotSpot CEO Joe Krauss, among others including a cool photo walk with Thomas Hawk.

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Audiocasting: Pluggd vs Odeo

Now I'm by no means a seasoned audcaster or even a vetern one but I do produce some so I figure I have a right to as least speak up and give my opinion. So it was very cool when I read about the debut of a new start-up today.


Pluggd a Seattle bases start-up launched!

“What Google does for text-based web page searches, HearHere and Pluggd will do for audio and video searches,” said Pluggd CEO and co-Founder Alex Castro.

Now that is all well and good but I want to know what Pluggd is going to do for me. Now I signed up, added my own feed to the service and found our SDN feed, it was the old one so I pinged them to ask if they could update it. So here's the deal as I said I do create audcasts but I don't do a lot (it's increasing) so my question is what plans do they have to enhance their service and give me what Odeo already does?

With Odeo I can upload audio, link to audio and CREATE audio and add that directly to my audiocast which is cool as I don't do enough to give out the money for a full blown hosting service. Odeo also allows me to "claim" a feed, although I'm sure not of the reason for that so it's not really on my list of wants. The ability to record and save online though is very nice especially since I do most of my audiocasting while at conferences and conventions.

So since I'm really liking the interface, the design, the layout the features and everything about Pluggd and Odeo is just...well, it's just too much sometimes I want to switch completely over to it but I NEED that ability to do the recording and saving that Odeo gives me, or I need Odeo to give me the ability to remove some of the features and clutter they have on their site that doesn't appeal to me.

Does anyone know anyone at Pluggd that might be interested in entertaining this idea?

Maybe it's too much to hope for but I'm thinking, good vibe I guess you would call it, that the folks over at Pluggd are going to be just as cool as though at Zoho and are going to be watching the Blogosphere to find out what people are saying about them - so here's hoping they see this little call out.

Speaking of Zoho, total side note here, but I found to incoming links in my logs today and jumped over to check them out and found a blog I had just started to subscribe to regarding Audiocasting and audio stuff had posted about Zoho Suite and another I had not been aware of (but am now!) picked up on the fact that Zoho is aware and watching what is happening out here in blog land.

Trying Blip.tv

I decided that with so much talk from Scoble about Blip.tv I would go ahead and give it a shot. I use Sharkle for my videos, I've tried Google Video, YouTube, eVideoShare and also Jumpcut. I just really can't find one that really does what I want. I came across Flixn.com as well but which is very cool but again not really what I am looking for - of course I really don't know what I am looking for as I just don't have the time I wish I did for my Podcasts let alone doing any Videoblogging.

So anyway back to trying out Blip.tv, I figure if it works for the Scoble then I shouldn't complain too much he's got a whole heck of a lot more experience in this realm than I do.

So I went to the site and entered my user, password and email address.

That login name presents a false identity in that it could lead people to believe you're a side administrator.

So that was a new one, guess I better try a different user name ? What's with that!

So now I am "craigster" not my first choice of course.

Now that I am in and looking through the config (I can connect it to my blogs, flickr, del.icio.us, etc) it's not bad but this is really for the public stuff and I have quite a few little video clips I don't really want to make public. Oh well maybe Videoblogging is just not for me?

Scripting in a Box

Introducing SAP's Open Source Scripting Environment

The article talks about a package called Scripting in a Box that allows for a quick and painless installation of a number of scripting tools' Apache, PHP, MySQL, Perl, Python, Ruby/Rails and Eclipse -- all that on a Windows box.

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Education and Web 2.0, err Office 2.0

Often times we move forward in technology faster than the schools are able to keep up. The most pressing example I can think of, is the fact that back in the 80's there was no drug education in the schools as that was the responsibility of the parents, now in the 00's there is no social education regarding things like MySpace and online chat rooms and meetings, the answer again is that is the responsibility of the parents. Schools used to take the measure of "blocking" drugs from coming in instead of educating students on the dangers. Now we have drug education and I think we are better off, the new problem though is a lack of understanding in terms of the technologies out there and so schools simply "block" the sites from being accessed and turn the problem over to the parents alone. Personally I think a much better solution would not only be for the parents and the teachers and students to work together but also for those of us out here creating these new technologies to keep all of this mind.

Zoho, got love these guys, are making some of the first steps by looking to tailor and adapt their technologies to the education world.

I wanted to put out an early call to all educators using the Zoho services and request suggestions on the things that you would like to see from an educational perspective that would allow you to be more effective. I would love to hear any ‘use cases’ on how you currently use any of the Zoho offerings in your education setting and what works and what doesn’t.

We already know that a significant number people using our tools are working in education. We want to create an application that is focused on using the ‘Zoho Magic’ (AJAX based ease of use editing/authoring, colloboration etc) to provide a tool that allows teachers, professors, students and trainers to manage their learning opportunities.

Now by taking these first steps it helps to put a "face" to the technology and give educators a chance to speak directly with and learn how things are working and moving. Now will Zoho working with the educators help to keep kids from getting in trouble on MySpace? Probably not but as with everything it's a process and the first step in any process is bridging the divide between two worlds. In this case educators now start to build a bridge with a Web 2.0 company and thus start to have access to other Web 2.0 technologies and specialists and can then hopefully start to educate themselves, parents and students to the real world advantages, disadvantages and dangers involved in these new technologies.

Continued efforts, whether it be something as simple as making life easier and more accessible using Zoho QuickRead or as complex as creating an "awareness package" for kids and MySpace, each and every little bit we do to help bridge that divide will help so much down the road.

We each have a responsibility to the next generation, and that next generation will be wired a lot faster than we were...

Leaving Las Vegas...

I feel, hmmm, I'm not sure how I feel. I'm sitting at the airport in Las Vegas (free WiFi) and I just had some dinner and another two hours before my flight leaves and I've been going over in my head what it is that I think about the week and everything that happened.

First we had the SDN Day and PodTech was there, Shai showed up and everyone loved the format and Mark just did an awesome job on this one. He nailed it with the format and everything so kudos once again out to Mark! We had a blast with PodTech and I think we'll be doing some other things in the future with them which is cool because Robert, John and Michael were just great! I did not nearly get enough time, non really, to speak to them about all the podcasting and video casting we are doing on SDN to get some tips and tricks of the trade so I'll need to email them this week! Check out though all the great stuff they did while at SAP TechEd!

This of course was followed by the SAP TechEd and the opening of our SDN Clubhouse. Which was just amazing with lots of activities!

We also had several of the bloggers from SAP Blogger's corner, these are the bloggers SAP invited to attend and also gave access to all the people they wanted to speak to. I finally got to meet Ismael, Charlie, Cote and Mark and I also meet Tim and Mike. Which was very cool as most of them I was already subscribing to their blogs (reminds me that I did not get a chance to speak with Ismael - once again I missed my chance) and did not realize they would be the ones attending. I had even picked up on one of Charlie's blog posts the other week not knowing I would be meeting him shortly there after.

Meeting and hanging out with Rich and Bhanu, Edwin, John, Dagfinn, Tiest, and wow there are just so many people but if I continue to write names you'll be scrolling for hours.

Having Dan and Ed win the Demo Jam was just awesome! Even managed to Podcast about it. Eric really gave me the "Apple Bug" and then Dan today took me to my "first" Apple store - now to figure out how to get one of these things for work to make my Podcasts even better on SDN!

But alas it is over and it's time to start planning for the next one, which as of right now is around 30 days away in Amsterdam. I'll be looking James up in Amsterdam when I am there and maybe I'll be able to get him to join me along with Cote (nope did not forget) in a Podcast and get their thoughts on the SDN Community after both having experienced it first hand.

Oh and please a special thanks out to the SDN team that helped us hold everything together and an extra HUGE thanks go out to Philippe who pulled it all together!

What did you think? What was your experiences?

Zoho makes good...

It's great to see that others are really beginning to take notice and start thinking about community. It seems that Arvind get's it! Good Job! What better way to start building a community other than to actually highlight and focus on those in the community who are doing something above the norm?

Now they also seem to be listening to the demands of the community.

• Improve the usability of a form by validating field data even before it is submitted.
  
• Modify contents of the form dynamically when it is loaded.
  
• Modify field values based on user action (on other fields).
  

After an amazing SAP TechEd here in Las Vegas and now this I think I'm going to just go home and relax with the family and smile a lot.

Perfect solution to one Office 2.0 bug

The concept of Office 2.0 is not without it's faults and one, argueably the biggest one is the fact that you need a connection all the time.

Google Spreadsheets, actually don't seem to have that problem which is quite an interesting trick in itself.

Anyway back to the solution:



:-) OK honestly though how long do you really think it will be before this problem of lack of connection is really solved look at what Seattle has done with WiFi.

SDN Day, SDN Clubhouse and Demo Jam

Well I think it's all down hill from here, we've survived the SDN Day which was an unbelievable event as well as the first day of the SAP TechEd, the SDN Clubhouse and the Demo Jam.

So my first question was do I need to post a new blog on this or should I just share some links to the multitude of other blogs popping up? The power of blogging is just amazing and the speed at which things are coming is blowing my mind.

• A conversation with SAP’s Shai Agassi
  
• The enterprise reeducation of Robert Scoble
  
• SDN Day-The community coming together
  
• TechEd photos care of Charlie Wood
  
• SAP announces enterprise search
  
• SAP TechEd '06: Stallgeruch
  
• SDN Day - SDNers meet Labs, each other, the SDN team
  
• SDN Day was great!!!!
  
• SDN Day was Great!
  
• PodTech.Net at SAP TechEd
  
• Hello from SAP’s unplanned, but cool, community conference
  
• Summary of Shai's Keynote at SAP TechEd '06 Las Vegas
  
• SAP TechEd '06: It's Going to Be a Busy Day
  
• And the winners are ...
  
• SAP SDN Downloads with RadRails
  
• Greetings from SAP TechEd '06
  

And these are just some of the ones I found and it's only been one full day of TechEd itself - I'm not sure what more I can add at the moment? Truely mind blowing!

Flickr photos are coming into the SAP TechEd group and the SAP Developer Network group, I think the popular tags are sapteched and sdnday.

Some of what I do want to share though is some photos...

All photos can be found here.


My "crew" T-Shirt


Mark and Shai


Mark and the PodTech guys (these guys are awesome!)


Eric Wood - just met him and have a feeling he's really someone to keep your eye on


The top 3 from the Demo Jam!


Dan and Ed the winners! Actually the community won because they are providing what they built for free!

My schedule now should start to clear up a bit now that some of our major events are now over so I'm hoping to get to my video casting and podcasting starting tomorrow!

Las Vegas and the SDN Day

I'm here and I have to say - WOW! Never thought I could be in such awe at a place but Las Vegas is just WOW!

Looking forward to seeing everyone tomorrow at the SDN Day and then the rest of the week at the SDN Clubhouse!

Photos are already coming in from me, and others.

EditGrid Takes the lead!

It really looks like EditGrid is taking the in the realm of the Online Spreadsheet, a hearty congrats out to Cliff and the gang!

Cliff posted on my blog the other day that they supported charting, and now reading their official release about the newest update I'm seeing something to add to the appeal for me!

As a side note: let’s congratulate all contributors to the German translation spreadsheet whose efforts have directly led to the roll-out of EditGrid’s German version. EditGrid is now available in seven languages thanks to all contributors under the ELP.

The question though is do they have what it takes to stay up in front? Multilingual, charting, remote data, RSS feeds the appeal is there add in their responsiveness, hmmm the only thing I am missing is the feeling of community. I'm missing that with a lot of these applications though, perhaps one day...

SAP TechEd and the SDN Day

Just finishing up my meetings here at SAP Labs in Palo Alto, and getting pysch'd, pumped and ready to go for the SAP TechEd and especially the SDN Day!

Something really big just got announced by Mark over on SDN, looks like PodTech is coming to the SDN Day.

I also just came across this little entry, which is very cool as I'll finally be able to ask a few questions of mine and maybe get our SDN Podcasts and Video going a bit stronger!

Anyway, on Monday I’m off to the SAP conference in Las Vegas to film stuff for my show (will only be there on Monday, John is sticking around for a few more days). Mark Finnern there writes about the day on his blog. Looking forward to meeting the SAP’ers, make sure to say hi if you’re there.

- Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger

Calling Cliff and Ramesh

I just came across a post today over on Moonwatcher, by Charlie Wood and he asks "Why can't I use a spreadsheet to subscribe to data using RSS?"

Which made me wonder, how quick could EditGrid modify their "remote data" to include something like this or how quickly can Zoho Sheet modify theirs to include this?







Without community and the personal touch you become just another chunk of code among a sea of bytes and bits.

Zoho QuickRead :: Mozilla Add-ons :: Add Features to Mozilla Software

I blogged about this awhile back and had the privilege of being one of the initial beta testers and now it looks like it has been finally released! Good job Zoho!




Without community and the personal touch you become just another chunk of code among a sea of bytes and bits.

Once again, they show their focus...

One of the reasons that Zoho is going to continue to lead the pack is simply because they are listening and responding on multiple levels to the community at large.

Way to go Zoho and a hello to Krithiga whom spent the time to respond!

Remember my motto:

Without community and the personal touch you become just another chunk of code among a sea of bytes and bits.

The power of community is an amazing thing and with the proper focus and motivation your community can bring your product to the next level and beyond.



One of my favorite blogs to read are those of Kathy Sierra and her "Creating Passionate Users". I tend to read to see how I stack up in comparison to others out there trying to build communities as well.

So in my humble opinion community will be the deciding factor over the next year or so in how well some of the Office 2.0 applications maintain their place on the net.

Love these little web gadgets...

I just saw a post over on "Blag's" Blog where he was showing off his recent edition of SDN swag and of course his passion for the community and there on his blog he had this little deal so of course I was curious and tried it myself.

This website is worth
What is your website worth?

Interesting but does it mean anything? For me having the ability to talk and speak my mind and discuss things that I am passionate about is simply just priceless!

UPDATED! Just read this one over on ProBlogger and had to see how it compares.

My blog is worth $3,951.78.
How much is your blog worth?

The price tags goes up but still how in the world can you relate numbers even nice looking ones like that (I'm not an A-Lister after all - for whatever that is worth) to the simple fact that this is my little spot, my place and I can blog about the things I am most passionate and interested about?

Bottom line it can't it, it might help convince someone to advertise on here but I'm happy with the few cents Google gives me (and really it's only a few LOL) but that really doesn't matter either - my goal is to share the things I'm interested in with those who take the time to read what I have to say and more for those willing to speak up and respond to me...

Recognizing the power of blogging...

I never really gave it much thought but I guess blogging did get me to where I am today.

Oh by the way James, you found my old user on SDN, they did not just want to delete the user due to the few posts I made in the forums and such so I just created a new user, I guess it's time to deal with the old user though.

So today I am here and tomorrow? That will be even more interesting I think...

Contest - Office 2.0 Wallpaper

OK, now you can find a ton of wallpapers for Windows and for Linux as well as for other products, heck I'm even playing around with some for my book, however now that I've got a little Google Homepage module that sets the background image of the page I need a cool Office 2.0 image, so where are all the graphic folks out there?

I propose the following contest, create a cool wallpaper for the concept of Office 2.0, send me the wallpaper and I will put them all online for everyone to vote.


- from the Kuznetsov gallery

It's bad enough we have no official Swag but we should be able to at least get a cool wallpaper (yes I know how ironic it is for someone who proposes not having any files on your local computer to want this).

Zoho and the UI experience...

Zoho provide almost a complete online office suite - wordprocessor, spreadsheet, presentations, database - the main guys are there. However in using them I was very disappointed to find that each program had a *totally* different look-and-feel to them - they were, in effect, four entirely separate applications. They in no way felt part of a suite, and do not have any of the advantages outlined above.

- Dan100: The disappointment of Zoho

It seems Dan is having not such a great experience with Zoho, at least not as much as I have been so I guess that leads to the question, how serious is Zoho taking the UI experience of the users out there?

This year at the SAP TechEd, the SAP Developer Network (SDN) and the Business Process Expert (BPX) community will be having some sessions with our UI experts and interviewing many of our contributors to find out their thoughts on our UI and the general working of our website. Does Zoho do this? What about EditGrid or DabbleDB?

Office 2.0 Worker on the road...

I started my experiment back in April to become a 100% Office 2.0 Worker in my personal life and as much as possible in my professional life, to date I've done quite well and had quite a lot of luck with it. Now though I am on the road away from home for an extended period of time and putting things to a real test. I purposedly made sure not to "prepare" anything like I migh have in the past for being on the road, if you are true to being an Office 2.0 Worker then you really don't need anything more than an internet connection anyway.

So here I am in Florida, with a wireless connection, laptop and an "alien" desktop PC from my father, and I mean that it's "alien" to me as in I have not used it before. Of course my father's router was giving both my laptop and my wife's laptop trouble so I was limited to his PC, the "alien" one and he's not got FireFox which is my browser of choice but I'm not married to it so I was just as happy to go into IE.

Loading up my Google Homepage and going through all my normal daily stuff was a piece of cake:

• RSS Reader
  
• Bookmarks
  
• Blog
  
• Photos
  
• Documents
  
• Chat
  
• Mail
  
• Calendar
  
• Contacts
  

Life was good, until I ate something and of course needed to add the info into my Zoho Creator application I use to track things while I work to get into better shape.

Why does my IE not like Zoho Creator?

I loaded up my Zoho Creator and wanted to add in some info and I got nailed with an error message and thus was stuck and could do nothing.



So what is the deal with that, this of course is horrible as all those people I have been telling about Zoho Creator are now problem sitting back smiling and getting a good laugh as I argued with them how I had no problems with the basic functions but there were some advanced functions I really wanted to see added (they are in the Roadmap).

So Zoho - Charles where are you what is going on here?

Other than that though I am on top of the world, everything is working as if I was at home and working. I'm not missing anything - in fact I've been enjoying sitting poolside writing this blog and working on my book now that we got a new router and it's working with my laptop. When the laptop battery dies or the internet connection is gone, well I figure that's a sign that I have worked enough and it's time to jump in the pool and relax and catch some sun (Ernesto is gone finally and we got lucky once again here on the First Coast).

So far I would say the experiment has been a success, the simple fact that I can go onto any computer with an internet connection and continue to work without interuption is such an amazing feeling and has drastically reduced my stress levels when traveling as I don't need to worry about whether I have synced all my files, or gotten the most recent one present on my USB stick or laptop or something so I can cotinue to work.