Beyond Widgets: MuseStorm’s Advanced Data Services Vision July 5, 2006
Posted by Jerry Bowles in Ajax, Application Development, Companies, Enterprise Application Integration, Lite Computing, Small Apps, Web 2.0.3 comments
MuseStorm has created a lot of buzz in the past couple of weeks with its much linked tutorial on How to Create an Ajax Homepage and its web site that allows users to customize pre-made widgets, then add them to their site using a few lines of code. I spoke to MuseStorm co-founder Ori Soen by telephone this morning and he gave me an overview of company vision which goes far beyond widgets.
Right now, MuseStorm aggregates content from various Web sources (APIs) and serves data to applications. On the client-side, it provides modules that free the developer from dealing with APIs, Web services, data manipulation and most client-side programming.
MuseStorm widgets allow blogs and web site owners to easily integrate data from search engines, photo sharing services, EBay, Amazon, YouTube and others into their Web pages with no programming required. Web developers can use MuseStorm’s components and service to add dynamic data to their applications with minimal programming, in a variety of development environments.
As more, and more valuable, web-delivered services are developed and deployed in the future, Ori foresees the demand for a middle layer of advanced data management services to function as a “gateway” for customers on both sides of the server-client divide. For proprietary reasons, he is reluctant to name the specific services right now but he did share some of them with me and I think they are solid and have a lot potential. Says he:
It is no secret that the web is emerging as a service delivery platform, not simply a collection of static web pages. Right now, API providers are doing everything themselves. We think that a year from now, maybe a little bit more, these application providers are going to want to add various kinds of business management functionality and metrics to their offerings. That would require a lot of programming and platform- building that is extraneous to their core business. Long term, we see ourselves becoming that middle layer. If you’re an application or data provider, you can plug-in to MuseStorm and we can provide all kinds of valuable services to help you manage and run your business. At the same time, we are making it easy for users and developers to add dynamic functionality to their projects.
My impression is that MuseStorm’s plans to add advanced data services on top of its aggregation and distribution technology looks like an attractive business model.
Cross-posted from my other site Practical Widgets.
Dabble DB and ConnectBeam–Two For the Enterprise June 30, 2006
Posted by Jerry Bowles in Ajax, Application Development, Collaboration, Collective Intelligence, Companies, Enterprise Application Integration, Social Bookmarking, Social Networking, Tagging / Folksonomy, Web 2.0.4 comments
If you’re one of the thousands of people who use Excel as a database, as well as a spreadsheet, you probably realize you are trading functionality for ease of use and economy. Only one person at a time can enter data into an Excel database and there are limits to how much data you can store. Sharing the database with others is not easy or efficient. For individuals this is not usually a problem but these limitations can become critical in companies. A Vancouver-based startup called Dabble DB, which opened to the public yesterday, has come up with an extremely appealing online alternative that allows you to instantly copy data from MS Excel into its web application and massage the data in ways that are dificult to do with Excel. Dabble DB will even turn your data into an interactive relational database and let you share it with co-workers through RSS and iCal.
Dabble DB co-founders, Andrew Catton and Avi Bryant, have squarely targeted the enterprise market with a Web 2.0 solution. The company is well-financed having gotten a rumored US$2-million infusion this week from Ventures West.
Dabble DB is now offering a free one-month trial. You can watch a video of its features here.
ConnectlBeam is a startup that aims to take tagging and bookmarking into the enterprise marketplace which is—in principle, at least–a great idea but also one that faces some formidable cultural barriers. One big fear companies have is that workers will spend more time randomly surfing for items to bookmark and reading material marked by others than they will doing whatever it is they’re supposed to be doing at their desks. Another fear is that they will assign tags that are so uncommon that the system gets bogged down with archives that are not really useful. There is also the security issues involved in inviting others into the tree house—particularly from the other side of the firewall. Corporations do not like the kind of casual, ultimately self-correcting, anarchy that prevails on the consumer side of the web where users essentially police themselves. Companies are going to want to “control” the process to a large degree.
ConnectBeam’s solution suggests tags which is a step toward addressing the consistency issue and co-founders Puneet Gupta and Prem Malhotra have clearly paid a lot of attention to security. The company’s ultimate success will depend upon whether it can convince CIOs and CEOs that its solution delivers a clear and measurable payoff in increased productivity that is greater than the sum of their fears.
