Multi-Enterprise Business Applications (MEBA) are a new class of applications that can be used to support business processes that span enterprise and organizational boundaries. MEBAs leverage best practices and patterns from service-oriented architecture (SOA) techniques and technologies, and specifically cloud-based platforms, to facilitate the next-generation B2B (or multi-enterprise) collaboration.

This is a project I had the privilege to participate in for the past few months, along with my esteemed colleague, Wade Wegner, and under Jack Greenfield's leadership, as part of Microsoft's Platform Architecture Team. This project was just highlighted at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC2008) in Los Angeles a few weeks ago, as the RedPrairie keynote demos that showcased Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, and discussed in more depth in one of its breakout sessions (see Wade's blog for more info).

And more recently, we took a more architectural look at MEBA's at Microsoft's Strategic Architect Forum 2008 (SAF08).

Multi-Enterprise Business Applications<embed height="355" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" src="http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=saf08-multienterprise-business-applications-1228035296950984-8&amp;stripped_title=multienterprise-business-applications-presentation" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always"/> View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: architecture multi-enterprise)

So what do we mean by “multi-enterprise business applications”? They are a new class of applications, different from the traditional data-driven applications that focus on managing data and resources and providing access to end users. They are more focused on implementing business processes that span enterprises, such as traditional B2B integration and collaboration scenarios. They leverage and build upon message-based integration and use well-defined protocols and roles, such as fundamental approaches and technologies used in enterprise service-oriented architecture initiatives. Actually, in a way, they represent an approach of extending enterprise SOA beyond the four walls of each enterprise, to integrate and work more seamlessly with other enterprises.

At the same time, multi-enterprise business applications also have some differentiating requirements. Scenarios may include participants distributed throughout different parts of the world. And since they are intended to support mission-critical business activities, we need to have a very robust architecture that can ensure high availability, high reliability, a high-level of security; plus the need to have auditing, reporting, regulatory compliance, and so on; not significantly different from our enterprise IT architecture concerns from that perspective.

And unlike traditional SOA applications that are more focused on functional capabilities within one enterprise, MEBAs extend the SOA concepts and technologies to business processes that span multiple enterprises. In addition, because MEBAs operate between organizations, their primary concerns are also different – community management, identity management, process execution management, multi-enterprise governance, etc.

Moreover, unlike incumbents in the B2B software and service providers spaces where implementations today consist mostly of customizing proprietary products and services; MEBA defines an architecture in which foundational, common services should be implemented, and how they can composited into applications that define business processes. The evolution and maturity model of MEBAs are also more dependent on the community, than any one vendor maintaining a solution. MEBAs are a new class of applications; not a new class of products or solutions.

Thus MEBA’s can be used across many different industries, especially ones that, from a traditional B2B perspective, tend to have a lot of cross-organizational collaboration needs. During this phase of the MEBA project, we attempted to take a more detailed look at the supply chain industry. And a more detailed view found many capabilities, within the supply chain industry, that today leverage various forms of technologies and implementation approaches to facilitate communication and integration across multiple partners on supply chain networks, or in a way, multiple enterprises. And for our project, we chose just one specific area, supply chain orchestration, to investigate further to evaluate how MEBA’s can be used to meet its specific requirements. So at the next lower level of detail, we have identified a set of common scenarios in supply chain orchestration. And then we chose just a few to prototype out, such as search for capacity, product recall, etc.; by building with Microsoft's Azure Services Platform.

Challenges Today

So now taking a few steps back up. Let’s talk about how some of these scenarios and capabilities are implemented today across the various industries. First of all we have multiple protocols that are intended to standardize the interaction models and data being exchanged. Some are more industry specific, such as RosettaNet, HL7 for healthcare, and FIX for financial services. While some are designed to be more general purpose, such as ebXML, WS-BPEL or BPEL4WS, and many others such as WS-Choreography, Java Business Integration (JBI), etc.

But this at the same time also hints at some challenges we have today, as in a way, there are just too many standards. And many organizations are in the process of developing more standards to define how multi-enterprise collaboration should be facilitated in their industries. For example, automotive, auto parts distribution, etc.; just to name a few.

And the observation today, is that, B2B, or integration or collaboration between multiple enterprises, or inter-enterprise SOA, is still relatively complex and difficult to implement and manage.

For example, we have a very diverse set of technologies, collected from the past 25 years or so in various attempts at optimizing or streamlining communications between multiple organizations. Everything from EDI, FTP, on-premises software, integration service providers, B2B gateways, to the current class of SOA solutions that can be extended to support B2B scenarios.

And not just the underlying technologies used, enterprises have very sophisticated needs and concerns in many areas, such as security, data ownership, management, and governance, etc. What’s more here, is that these needs and concerns are in a way, amplified or more complex when we look at them from a cross-organizational perspective.

Why MEBA?

So integration and enabling business processes across organizational boundaries, have been complex and difficult to accomplish, for many years. Why do we think now we may have a better chance at simplifying and streamlining efforts in this area, and moreover, why do we think MEBA’s, as a new class of applications may have a better chance at doing so?

Traditional B2B or multi-enterprise communication and collaboration were complex to implement and often unreliable and error-prone. Organizations had to deal with a multitude of technologies, standards, and additional sets of technologies and implementations with each partner organization on a one-to-one basis. MEBAs aim to streamline and simplify these inherent complexities, by providing an architecture that builds on existing technologies and abstracts infrastructural concerns.

From a timing perspective, the growing inter-dependence and always-connected environment for businesses, and availability of key new technologies (Web services, SOA, cloud computing, etc.), are showing signs that the time is right to take a new approach at multi-enterprise (or B2B) interactions. MEBAs build on the best practices and proven technology models of today, and offer the potential to greatly streamline and simplify efforts of implementing business processes that span multiple enterprises.

And in general, by leveraging many of the best practices and building on many of the latest trends, such as the concept of an “Internet Service Bus” (ISB) providing an architecture and platform, upon which multi-enterprise business applications can be constructed, that simplify and streamline many aspects of B2B integration today, while meeting the needs of the organizations and participants involved. We think, this concept of the ISB, will significantly transform the architecture, and how we design and implement approaches to facilitate multi-enterprise business applications.

And of course, this doesn’t mean we intend to replace the work organizations have already done with protocols and standards (such as RosettaNet, ebXML, HL7, FIX, etc.). In fact we think we can leverage those work, and use MEBA’s to provide implementations of these protocols, as well as an environment / platform to facilitate their orchestration and management.

Thus MEBAs provide the potential of these high-level benefits:

Business benefits – improve business agility, bottom-line revenue (reduced errors and cost, and faster response), and top-line revenue (higher automation, improved relationships with partners and customers)

Technical benefits – simplify and streamline connectivity, improve visibility and governance, higher quality of service, focus on delivering business processes instead of infrastructure, leverage standards-based technologies, bridge multiple and disparate identity systems, etc.

MEBA Reference Architecture

Now let us show you what a reference architecture for multi-enterprise business applications may look like. Just as you would expect, there are many layers of capabilities from this perspective. Basically, these applications will need to have a foundational services layer, which provides some core infrastructure capabilities such as compute or runtime environment, identity management system, workflow execution and management, robust messaging infrastructure, data management solution, and operational management services. On top of that, we can then build a layer of higher-level services, which are considered more functional, and provides capabilities such as community management (extending from trading party management in a traditional B2B perspective), services orchestration, business process management, party management, and so on. Then finally, we can build various types of communities, or partner networks, that define working relationships between multiple organizations. For example, each organization can belong to multiple communities, or as administrators to a particular community, can invite and add new partners, and so on. We would also like to use model-driven techniques to define business processes, and to be able to provision one or more instances of a given business process, each supporting a specific community of trading partners.

Azure Services Platform

When we saw the plans for the Azure Services Platform, we studied them to understand the kinds of applications it would support. Our conclusion was that it will spawn a second generation of B2B applications. We then coined the name MEBA to describe this new class of applications. Our focus here is to talk about MEBAs and how they can leverage this Azure Services Platform. So we will not get into the details of the Azure Services Platform, but we do want to articulate specifically how some of its components help support the MEBA concept.

Windows Azure – the cloud compute platform, provides the underlying runtime environment for the foundational services and MEBA implementation. It offers high scalability and reliability, and global reach to partners across the world

.NET Services – with its Service Bus, Access Control Services, and Workflow Services, provides the fundamental “Internet Service Bus” that can effectively address common concerns around identity and security, connectivity, and service orchestrations between multiple organizations

SQL Services – provides the scalable and reliable cloud-based database solution, which helps to establish databases in the cloud to manage the data that is shared across the multiple organizations, and especially data that support the communities and their interactions

Live Services – provides capabilities to connect to end users and support many aspects of human interaction needs

Food for Thought

MEBAs have the potential of completely changing the way enterprises interact with each other. If we further extend the MEBA vision and how it continues to simplify and streamline infrastructure concerns in facilitating business processes across organizations, we may see a world where business networks can be quickly and dynamically constructed to deliver business capabilities, simply by being able to connect the dots (or building with blocks). Business results delivered by the collective resources and capabilities from a network of multiple enterprises will become true differentiating factors, and more significant than any one enterprise can deliver alone. New business models may also emerge, as increasingly enterprises can participate in the larger scheme of things, and sometimes be a part of the process that span industries. The control of processes may begin to shift away from being enterprise-centric, to community-centric. Ultimately, enterprises can create new, more diverse, and more differentiating business offerings by being able to leverage the community of partners.

Cross-posted from my blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/dachou

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The Live Framework team would like to invite you to join the first webcast and chat event for the Live Framework. During the session, you will have a chance to hear from the Microsoft engineering team that architected and developed the Live Framework. The session will be held from 8am PST to 10am PST on Dec 8th, 2008.

<!----><o:p> </o:p>

The agenda for the session:

8:00am – 8:30am: Introduction to tne Live Framework, Overview of support resources

8:30am – 8:45am: Live demonstration of sample application development.

8:45am-10:00am: Open Q&A.

<o:p> </o:p>

If there are any questions in-depth technical/coding questions that you would like us to cover as part of Q&A, you can post them in advance on this forum thread. We will try to cover as many as we can.

<o:p> </o:p>

Joining and viewing online Webcast <o:p></o:p>

You can join the online webcast using any standard browser here: https://www.livemeeting.com/cc/microsoft/join?id=LiveFx_Dec8&role=attend <o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

Alternatively, you can dial-in to listen to audio using these numbers and participant pass-code.

<o:p> </o:p>

Toll Number : <o:p></o:p>	BELGIUM  <o:p></o:p>  +32-3-400-2811 <o:p></o:p>  DENMARK  <o:p></o:p>  +45-7014-0278 <o:p></o:p>  FRANCE  <o:p></o:p>  +33-1-70-70-62-75 <o:p></o:p>  GERMANY  <o:p></o:p>  +49-69-2222-7227 <o:p></o:p>  HONG KONG  <o:p></o:p>  +852-2286-5645 <o:p></o:p>  IRELAND  <o:p></o:p>  +353-1-247-5443 <o:p></o:p>  JAPAN  <o:p></o:p>  +81-3-5539-5167 <o:p></o:p>  SWITZERLAND  <o:p></o:p>  +41-44-580-6291 <o:p></o:p>  USA  <o:p></o:p>  +1-203-480-8000 <o:p></o:p>
Toll Free / Freephone : <o:p></o:p>	AUSTRALIA  <o:p></o:p>  1-800-202-713 <o:p></o:p>  BRAZIL  <o:p></o:p>  0800-8911983 <o:p></o:p>  NEW ZEALAND  <o:p></o:p>  0800-448-997 <o:p></o:p>  USA  <o:p></o:p>  866-500-6738 <o:p></o:p>
Participant Passcode: <o:p></o:p>	1957172   <o:p></o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

<o:p> </o:p>

Thank you very much for your participation. We look forward to hearing from you.

<o:p> </o:p>

Live Framework Team

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Nu finns intervjuerna som vi gjorde på Öredev publicerade på Channel9.

Jag talade bland annat med Eilon Lipton om ASP.NET MVC-ramverket och med Scott Hunter om ASP.NET Dynamic Data. Johan Lindfors gjorde bl.a. en intervju med Glenn Block om MEF (Microsoft Extensibility Framework). Vi spelade även in en paneldebatt om rika klienter och arbetsflödet mellan utvecklare och designers.

Du hittar ovanstående + ett gäng till intressanta intervjuer här.

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<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/7L2fsubA2-c&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/7L2fsubA2-c&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object>

Get it whilst it’s good…seems it’s being pulled from YouTube and Hulu at the moment. You know you’ve reached Zen cool status when The Simpson’s parodies you.

[Apple ]
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A cool new ASP.NET server control - <asp:chart /> - can be used for free with ASP.NET 3.5 to enable rich browser-based charting. Once installed the <asp:chart/> control shows up under the "Data" tab on the Toolbox, and can be easily declared on any ASP.NET page as a standard server control.

The control was announced in Scott Guthrie's blog posting, New ASP.NET Charting Control: <asp:chart runat="server"/>.

<asp:chart /> supports a rich assortment of chart options - including pie, area, range, point, circular, accumulation, data distribution, ajax interactive, doughnut, and more. You can statically declare chart data within the control declaration, or alternatively use data-binding to populate it dynamically. At runtime the server control generates an image (for example a .PNG file) that is referenced from the client HTML of the page using a <img/> element output by the <asp:chart/> control. The server control supports the ability to cache the chart image, as well as save it on disk for persistent scenarios. It does not require any other server software to be installed, and will work with any standard ASP.NET page.

<!----><o:p>You can:</o:p>

• Download the free Microsoft Chart Controls
• Download the VS 2008 Tool Support for the Chart Controls
• Download the Microsoft Chart Controls Samples
• Download the Microsoft Chart Controls Documentation<
• Visit the Microsoft Chart Control Forum

 

[Web UX .NET Framework ]
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thanks to Frank for reminding me :)

It’s flown by. I’ve met amazing people, found some lifetime friends and basically had a blast – if I get time over the next few days I may write up my top 11 moments at Microsoft.

Thanks to Bill, Steve, Neil, Karl, Natalie, Alistair…etc etc etc….and Microsoft. For paying me to do my hobby for the most part…I’m a lucky man

cheers!

[Microsoft Blogs ]
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Now that Lord Conrad Black (former Daily Telegraph proprietor) is in prison, he has come to the conclusion that the US justice and prison systems (and the "war on drugs") are flawed. The system is based on the plea bargain: the barefaced exchange of incriminating testimony for immunity or a reduced sentence. It is intimidation and suborned or extorted perjury, an outright rape of any plausible definition of justice.

The US is now a carceral state that imprisons eight to 12 times more people (2.5m) per capita than the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany or Japan. US justice has become a command economy based on the avarice of private prison companies, a gigantic prison service industry and politically influential correctional officers’ unions that agitate for an unlimited increase in the number of prosecutions and the length of sentences. The entire “war on drugs”, by contrast, is a classic illustration of supply-side economics: a trillion taxpayers’ dollars squandered and 1m small fry imprisoned at a cost of $50 billion a year; as supply of and demand for illegal drugs have increased, prices have fallen and product quality has improved.

From my cell I scent the reeking soul of US justice

[Civlib ]
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We at Boing Boing are all big fans of GOOD. For those of you haven't checked it out, in print or online, GOOD creates media "for people who give a damn." That's something we can get behind. We've linked to their fantastic articles and data visualizations frequently in the past. So we were delighted when the good people at GOOD approached us about collaborating in some way. Our first dance together is "Boing Boing on GOOD," wherein each week Mark, Xeni, Joel, or I will post a short essay or article to the GOOD blog. We'll take those opportunities to delve a bit deeper into our current fixations and fascinations and connect the dots between groups of posts we've made here. "Boing Boing on GOOD" promises to be a fun experiment and we hope you'll join the conversation! Mark wrote the first piece and it's a doozy, about the science fiction horrors of Botox. Apparently, Botox injections may prevent "people from responding with appropriate anger to things that aren’t good for them." From Mark's essay, titled "I Have No Wrinkles And I Must Scream": I enjoy studying my five-year-old daughter’s facial expressions, because they’re such immediate and sensitive indicators of her emotional state. This morning, when I told Jane there was a stack of hot pancakes on the table, her face lit up with glee. In the afternoon, when she found out her older sister had given our pet chickens names without first consulting her, a dark cloud of anger and disappointment crossed her face. (She got over it in forty-five seconds.)

It goes without saying that our internal emotional states drive our outward behavior and emotional expressions. What’s not as obvious is that the path runs in both directions — that is, our actions and facial expressions tell us how to feel, just as our emotions tell us how to act. This effect is known as the facial feedback hypothesis. Charles Darwin, who wrote The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872, understood that an action can cause the experience of a feeling. As William James said of the phenomenon: “We don’t run because we are scared; we are scared because we run.”
"I Have No Wrinkles And I Must Scream" (GOOD)

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Two posts (1 2) on C# loop optimization got me thinking recently.

Thinking about what I did when I first joined Microsoft.

Way back in the spring of 1995 or so (yes, we did have computers back then, but the Internet of the time really *was* just a series of tubes), I was on the C++ compiler test team, and had just picked up the responsibility for running benchmark tests on various C++ compilers. I would run compilation speed and execution speed tests in controlled environments, so that we could always know where we were.

We used a series of “standard” benchmarks – such as Spec – and a few of our own.

Because execution speed was one of the few ways (other than boxes with lots of checkmarks) that you could differentiate your compiler from the other guy’s, all the compiler companies invested  resources at being faster at the benchmarks.

The starting point was to look at the benchmark source, the resultant IL, and the final machine code, and see if you could see any opportunity for improvement. Were you missing any optimization opportunities?

Sometimes, that wasn’t enough, so some compiler writers (*not* the ones I worked with) sometimes got creative.

You could, for example, identify the presence of a specific expression tree that just “happened to show up” in the hot part of of a benchmark, and bypass your usual code generation with a bit of hand-tuned assembly that did things a lot faster.

Or, with a little more work, you could identify the entire benchmark, and substitute another bit of hand-tuned assembly.

Or, perhaps that hand-tuned assembly doesn’t really do *all* the work it needed to, but took a few shortcuts but still managed to return the correct answer.

For some interesting accounts, please text “compiler benchmark cheating” to your preferred search engine.

As part of that work, I got involved a bit in the writing and evaluation of benchmarks, and I thought I’d share a few rules around writing and interpreting micro-benchmarks. I’ll speak a bit about the two posts – which are about looping optimizations in C# – along the way. Just be sure to listen closely, as I will be speaking softly (though not in the Rooseveltian sense…)

Rule 0: Don’t

There has always been a widespread assumption that the speed of individual language constructs matter. It doesn’t.

Okay, it does, but only in limited cases, and frankly people devote more time to it than it deserves.

The more productive thing is to follow the agile guideline and write the simplest thing that works. And note that “works” is a bit of a weasely word here – if you write scientific computing software, you may have foreknowledge about what operations need to be fast and can safely choose something more complicated, but for most development that is assuredly not true.

Rule 1: Do something useful

Consider the following:

void DoLoop()
{
    for (int x = 0; x < XMAX; x++)
    {
        for (int y = 0; y < YMAX; y++)
        {
        }
    }

}

void TimeLoop()
{
    // start timer
    for (int count = 0; count < 1000; count++)
    {
        DoLoop();
    }
    // stop timer
}

if XMAX is 1000, YMAX is 1000, and the total execution time is 0.01 seconds, what is the time spent per iteration?

Answer: Unknown.

The average C++ optimizer is smarter that this. That nested loop has no effect on the result of the program, so the compiler is free to optimize it out (the .NET JIT may not have time to do this).

So, you modify the loop to be something like:

void DoLoop()
{
    int sum;

    for (int x = 0; x < XMAX; x++)
    {
        for (int y = 0; y < YMAX; y++)
        {
            sum += y;
        }
    }
}

The loop now has some work done inside of it, so the loop can’t be eliminated.

Rule 2: No, really. Do something useful

However, the numbers won’t change. The call to DoLoop() has no side effects, so the entire call can be safely eliminated.

To make sure your loop is really a loop, there needs to be a side effect. The best bet is to have a value returned from the method and write it out to the console. This has the added benefit of giving you a way of checking whether things are working correct.

Rule 3: Benchmark != Real world

There are lurking effects that invalidate your results. Your benchmark is likely tiny and places very different memory demands on the system than your real program does.

Rule 4: Profile, don’t benchmark

 

C# loop optimization

If you are writing code that needs the utmost in speed, there is an improvement to be had using for rather than foreach. There is also improvement to be had using arrays rather than lists, and unsafe code and pointers rather than array indexing.

Whether this is worthwhile in a specific case depends exactly on what the code is doing. I don’t see a lot of point in spending time measuring loops when you could spend time measuring the actual code.

[CSharp Programming ]
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Black Friday horror stories are inevitable, but nothing can compare to the trampling death of a 34 year old Walmart employee. But who is really to blame? Let us know—and feel free to vent. Oh,...
[Question of the Day Black Friday Deals Shopping Tragedy Walmart ]
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Earlier this year, Leah Culver appeared on the cover of a tech magazine blowing an enormous pink bubble. But the shrill-voiced San Francisco programmer no longer desires fame — even the modest...
[Pownce Acquisitions Brad Fitzpatrick Daniel Burka Digg Kevin Rose Kevin Rose leah culver Six Apart Top ]
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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Internet

Apple 2.0's Philip Elmer-DeWitt notes some new Net Applications statistics that suggest 8.87 percent of all Internet users use a Mac: a new record.

Add to that the iPhone platform's 0.37 percent, and over one in eleven use an Apple product to browse the web. The iPhone gained 12 percent more users compared to the month before.

Also notable is that Windows users accounted for less than 90 percent of Internet users for the first time in recent memory. Also, market share for Internet Explorer dropped below 70 percent for the first time since its popularity surged in the late 90s.

Linux also gained ground, increasing almost 17 percent to 0.83 percent of all Internet users.

Net Applications tracks statistics from over 160 million visits to websites it monitors. The full report is here.

TUAWMac internet share hits record 8.87% originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[browser internet market marketshare net applications NetApplications share ]
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The $expand option in the query filter is used to request entities associated with the last segment of a request. This is often used to ensure that entities can be materialized with their relationships wired together and to reduce the number of roundtrips to the server.

For example, if http://www.example.com/service.svc/Customers returns all customers, then http://www.example.com/service.svc/Customers?$expand=Orders could be used to return all customers with all their Orders, assuming customers have an Orders collection.

You can use request multiple references and collections to be exapnded. One gotcha about the $expand syntax is that there is a different syntax for "drilling" through references: the forward slash is used to indicate drilling in, while a comma is used to separate the parallel expansion paths.

Here are some examples that will hopefully clarify this (omitting the path to the service).

• /Customers?$expand=Orders. Returns customers and the orders of the customers.
• /Customers?$expand=Orders,Preferences. Returns customers and the preferences of the customers.
• /Customers?$expand=Orders,Orders/OrderDetails,Preferences. Returns customers, the orders of the customers, the order details of the orders of the customers, and the preferences of the customers.
• /Customers?$expand=Orders/OrderDetails,Preferences. Same as the last one - when you go deep, all the parents are implied, so Orders/OrderDetailsOrders.
• /Customers?$expand=Orders/OrderDetails,Orders/ShippingInfo. Returns customers, the orders of the customers, the order details of the orders of the customers, and the shipping informatio of the orders of the customers. Note that the ',' is used to separate paths starting from the last segment (Customers), so if you want to expand properties in parallel from a deeper entity, you need to specify the path again, as in this example.

Hope this was helpful - please post comments if you have further questions!

[Entities Performance ADO.NET Data Services ]
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Online language translation app Frengly autodetects the source language of text and quickly translates it into your language of choice. Just paste any piece of text into Frengly, hit translate, and...
[Translation Google Google Translate Language ]
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The iPhone has never seemed a likely contender as a smart phone for the blind (it's certainly not designed for touch typing), which makes this case by designer Bruno Fosi all the more impressive. The Silicon Touch covers the phone's screen and features a selection of bas-relief buttons that correspond to menu items in a custom app, allowing those with diminished sight access to all the phone's functions, including multi-touch and finger flick scrolling. Right now it's just a concept, but we're hoping to see this one become a reality sooner rather than later.

[Via Yanko Design]

Filed under: Cellphones

Silicon Touch: an iPhone case for the visually impaired originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Dec 2008 16:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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[blind blindness Bruno Fosi BrunoFosi iphone iphone case IphoneCase Silicon Touch SiliconTouch visually impaired VisuallyImpaired ]
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MySpace is not known for good design. Its garish profiles make designers nauseous. And yet, there are signs of hope: we’ve tracked down 50 MySpace music layouts that are quite remarkable. Stylish. Stunningly well-conceived. Beautiful, even.

Could it be that MySpace profiles aren’t all bad? You be the judge.

A Fine Frenzy - This artist has been high in the charts for quite some time, and her page, courtesy of BandSpaces.com, happened to make it as the first in our musical roundup. As you can see, it’s no wonder why.

Joss Stone - It’s all about placement and graphics. One glance down the artist’s page and it’s clear that the standard layout can be warped with some nice colorful touches. This page is a winner.

Shine - You can keep your page looking segmented if you like, but it doesn’t have to be boring. Sweep the page with images and buttons in the right places and you’ve got yourself a rockin’ MySpace destination.

MyNameIsAugust - Delivered by OutLoudMarketing, the page for August looks fairly ordinary in comparison with the items above, but it still manages to please.

Valerie Nicole - Tidy and neat, this isn’t as in-your-face as some of the others, but it’s still a sight for sore eyes - of which there are plenty across the wide world of MySpace.

Underhills - Though the silver-colored music player does feel a little clunky amid the wallpaper, the complete ensemble is nothing short of fantastic. It’s one of those pages bound to elicit an “I wish that had been mine” kind of critique from visitors.

Airlines - Let’s face it. Good promotional media from bands can mean great publicity. (Books are judged by their covers, in other words.) Which is why the MySpace page for The Airlines, another invention of BandSpaces, lands on this list. It gives the visitor a clear impression that they can make equally kick-ass without breaking the bank.

Lady Sovereign - I’ve been somewhat familiar with Lady Sovereign’s songbook for several seasons now, and the sharp color contrast of her MySpace page is befitting of the musical experience she delivers. Very billboard-esque, this one is.

Stereo Transmitted Disease - If you want to take things a little musica obscura in terms of your band name and bio and things, the page assembled for STD sets a good example. It’s a kind of hodgepodge, wrapped into an easily digestible square.

Man Like Machine - Lots of white space but still fun and playful, Man Like Machine is a music page, but gets marked in the Just Plain Pretty category just the same.

We Are Tokyo - This design is white and red in a way reminiscent of staple colors commanded by The White Stripes. Which is fine by us, because We Are Tokyo pull it off quite well.

Mia Sable - This is a winner in so many ways. Done up with just the right amount of glitz and glamour to make it stand out from the crowd, Mia Sable’s MySpace page is nothing short of fantastic. If this doesn’t make you envious, few others will.

The Academy Is - Having your band name plastered across nearly the full top fold of your MySpace page may not such a bad thing, so long as everything else looks proper. And it does!

Censura - Put your name and music front and center and leave the rest for window dressing. This one is not only beautiful. The geography of it makes it worthwhile to emulate.

The Midway State - Another boxy beaut, the page for The Midway State is impressive for its elegant design and its translucent features.

Race the Sun - This one’s simply a gem to look at. Loading the page takes some time, and some things make seem out of place, but heck if this isn’t one of the most image-enhanced pages on the network.

Cambria Detken - An extraordinary piece of work, the profile for Cambria Detken is one of the best. It makes good use of white space like and wraps it up in butterflies and flowers with plenty of green to go around.

Mr North - Oh what some motion graphics can do. The idea here is to splash the page. The paint job is entertaining. The features are all there. Altogether, it’s an engaging place to be. Which is the point.

Rented Mule - One of the more plainly drawn pages, Rented Mule Jazz is something that lots of folks could take cues from without a degree in design. Easy does it.

Helena Jesse - The lesson here: put heavy emphasis on your header and you’ll grab some attention. The rest of the page is fairly ordinary, but perhaps we’re in store for further enhancements.

Goodnight Caulfield - Akin to the Mia Sable page, albeit made for a four-piece group, Goodnight Caulfield’s profile is so polished that you start to question whether anything is wrong with it. Very little, it turns out!

Gonna Get Got - What a treat. Name emblazoned in white across the top, great graphical touches the entire length of the page, music placed front and center. What else can you ask for? Add another URL to the winner’s circle.

Zone Music - It would be quite basic without that collage to the right of the music player, but if that’s what makes this gem, then so be it. The page is superb with all facets included.

Paul Cullen - So well done, yet not excessively so. It befits the artist, for sure. Which is how it should be, wouldn’t you agree? Out Loud is responsible for making this page happen.

Scott Philipp - That’s Scott Philipp and the StoneBaby Band, to be precise. The contrast of colors make seem a little unusual to some. Black and soft gold are quite a juxtaposition to make. But stick around for a moment and you’ll why we picked it as one of the best.

Ricky Martin - Alright, you may like the guy’s music, or you may not. But one thing is certain. His MySpace page is a great one. It’s refined and easy to navigate without being imposing in any way.

The Stooges - The page rocks. Enough said.

Lenny Kravitz - If you haven’t seen the place before, you will be surprised. The choice of  photo slideshow and background and menu layout and profile componentry, there’s something for most any MySpace page designer to be fond of.

The Almost - Bold and soft all in one page, it’s an interesting thing to look at. It’s colorful but not too much so. It’s very clearly and basically designed, which makes it seem borderline amateurish. So it get a nod.

JMR Productions - We’ll toss this in simply for spice. It’s brash and at the same time fairly plainspoken. It’s great.

Brianna Sage - One of the better sites to make smart use of white space, the profile constructed by Out Loud for Brianna Sage is really well done. The design firm has certainly shown a consistency across many of its creations that it’s hard to imagine anything dreadful coming from its assembly line. A complementary applause is deserved.

Teddy Geiger - It’s not immediately apparent that this is a great design, but give it a moment, we say. It’s the right mix of photography and fringe edits that give it a place on this map.

Ken Hyland - One of the more clean and collected profiles of this broad bunch, the profile for Ken Hyland has professionalism written all over it.

Coldplay - Are broad brush strokes enough to make a MySpace page attractive? We think so. Oh, and there are plenty of little quirks and uniquities to satisfy most folks. (Just as long as they’re noticed.)

Led Zeppelin - The page is top notch. There’s nothing else to say, really. Top notch, indeed. Befitting of the band, wouldn’t you say?

Blue Island Tribe - It’s all waterworks here. And we have to admit, it looks pretty darn good. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but if you’re looking for surfer inspiration, you’ll be hard-pressed to find something much better.

Anouk - From top to bottom (or at least the middle), Anouk’s MySpace page is nicely finished. Everything is clearly delineated, which definitely works in its favor.

Kate Nash - It’s amazing what a checkerboard background can do to a MySpace page, isn’t it?

Citizen Cope - A grand banner topping the page, Citizen Cope’s profile has its rough spots, but there’s nothing that will displease. Chalk that assessment up to the backdrop.

Death Cab for Cutie - Have we gotten loose with our praise with this one? Perhaps, perhaps not. It’s certainly a subjective thing. Some will love the page for its squarish sensibility. It’s got a few abstract bones in its body, for sure.

Dido - Mostly black with plenty of beveled edges, Dido’s profile is well made. There’s ample empty space, which can detract from the sense of fine design, but that may suit some folks. Does it suit you?

Eisley - At least one member of the Mashable crew is partial to Eisley (hint: check the byline), so take this plug as you wish. The extra-large borders around every piece of the puzzle are what really bring things home.

Elbow - This band’s profile is black and white done right. It’s as simple as that.

Eminem - Everything’s so packed together that we can’t help but like it. It’s pretty much the antithesis of sprawl. Kudos on the set design, Eminem.

Ingrid Michaelson - There’s hardly anything unusual about this page, but its colorway and layout are what we think every band should strive for at the very least. The better to please listeners.

M.I.A. - Beware of the flash. Alternatively, if you like the flash, you’ll love it. Seriously.

Nine Inch Nails - Another fairly docile setup, the Nine Inch Nails profile is totally square and totally worth a plug. It’s NIN, through and through.

Radiohead - Its theme coincides with the In Rainbows release, so of course it looks great. Love the darkness, people. Love the darkness!

Smashing Pumpkins - How to summarize…. It has an elaborate headdress with plenty of band stamps to go around. Thumbs up for intelligent design.

U2 - Compared with the first half of this series, the U2 page is, in terms of the band’s global impression, woefully inadequate. But that’s this Irish quartet, for you. MySpace just isn’t cool enough for Bono and his Chanel shades. The thing is, the profile still amounts to an appreciable contribution to the network. How’s that for a finale?

---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:

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Fox Sports’ News Tracker for MySpace
Fruit Signs Offering Custom MySpace Layouts
CuStickam - Stickam Profile Editor

[Channels Lists Web Design myspace social networking web Layouts profiles themes web design ]
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The Microsoft Canada team is back from Western Canada and I am, as many of us are, catching up on your emails from the past week. In the mean time, enjoy this slightly older campaign by CRN for their channel champions awards.

<embed src="http://services.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f8/1596744117" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" flashvars="videoId=1701249245&amp;linkBaseURL=http://www.crn.com/video/index.jhtml?id=1701249245&amp;playerId=1596744117&amp;viewerSecureGatewayURL=https://console.brightcove.com/services/amfgateway&amp;servicesURL=http://services.brightcove.com/services&amp;cdnURL=http://admin.brightcove.com&amp;domain=embed&amp;autoStart=false&amp;" base="http://admin.brightcove.com" name="flashObj" width="486" height="412" seamlesstabbing="false" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" swliveconnect="true" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash"></embed>

I am happy to say that I'm working exactly where I wanted to when I was younger. How about you?

Cheers,

Satish

Thank you for reading...

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This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

[Just for fun ]
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Merriam-Webster has announced its 2008 "Word of the Year." The winner? "Disemvowel" "Bailout," which "received the highest intensity of lookups on Merriam-Webster Online over the shortest period of time." And the next four in the Top Ten list: 2. vet
3. socialism
4. maverick
5. bipartisan #1 Word of the Year for 2008 (via Michael Leddy's Orange Crate Art)

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For most of my projects, I don't get the benefit of assigning work requests to others. (However, for one of my current projects, the project's chief decision-maker and I have agreed to let me assign work requests when I finish them back to her for review.)

For projects where multiple individuals are involved, I typically use the following criteria when assigning work requests to them:

• Currently-assigned subject matter areas.
• Expertise in similar subject matter areas.
• Seniority in the organization.
• Job title, level, roles, and responsibilities.
• The individual's interest in the subject matter.
• Current committed-to workload.
• Upcoming planned time away from work.

The better I understand my team members' schedules, skills, and interests, the easier it is for me to schedule work requests and feel confident that they'll get it done faster and with a reasonable satisfaction level while they work.

In future posts, I will discuss how I schedule and track work requests to increase my efficiency.

-- Paul

------------------------------------
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

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Compliments of the FCC, we're getting an early look at Netgear's beefy yet practical response to the typical home theater PC. The Netgear Digital Entertainer Elite, expected to be officially...
[Htpc Computers Digital Entertainer Elite Hd Home Theater Home Theater PC Netgear Netgear Digital Entertainer Elite PCs Streaming Streaming Media ]
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I remember when I was 8 years old standing in the middle of our living room, gazing at our Christmas tree. I dared not blink, fearing that the twinkling tinsel, gleaming lights, and the pile of festively wrapped gifts would all be gone when I opened my eyes again. Once I finally hopped into bed, still wide-awake and staring at the ceiling, I listened to every gust of wind, every creak of the rafters, wondering if Santa had landed on our roof. “Where is Santa now?” I thought. “When will he be here?” Eventually, sheer mental exhaustion ushered me off to sleep.

The spirit of the season and a wondrous curiosity electrify many people's imaginations during the holidays, especially on Christmas Eve. That’s why Google has teamed up again this year with NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, to bring you the NORAD Santa Tracker.

NORAD provides aerospace warning and control for North America 365 days a year. On Christmas Eve, they turn their attention to Santa, tracking his yearly gift-delivering journey from the North Pole. The Santa Tracker itself goes live at 6am EST on December 24th. In the meantime, you will find the unique history of the Santa Tracker, holiday-themed games (a new one released each day) and updates from the North Pole at www.noradsanta.org, the official NORAD Tracks Santa website.

Check it out, and don’t forget to bookmark the site so you can come back often throughout the month. And, of course, be sure to visit on Christmas Eve to follow Santa as he makes his way toward your area. You can track him in both Google Maps and Google Earth, and can also view videos of his flights over several landmark cities, captured by special "Santa cams." Here are some highlights from last year's Santa Tracker:

<object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/D7XpqeJyECo&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/D7XpqeJyECo&amp;hl=en&amp;fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="344" width="425"></embed></object>

(Visit www.noradsanta.org for more information.)

Happy holidays to all, and to Santa... a good flight!

Posted by Jeffery Martin, Geo Product Marketing Manager, child at heart
[Geo ]
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I was a Pownce user. (Ack it can't find my page -- and I was a premium, paying user! Oy. When did that happen?)

There were some things I liked about it, but I agree it's time to pull the plug.

I stopped using it when:

1. Twitter got its act together and stopped acting like a Norwegian parrot pining for the fjords.

2. FriendFeed occupied the space above Twitter, as the messaging system with more (than Twitter). FriendFeed has never had trouble staying up.

The biggest problem with Pownce was:

1. It couldn't handle even a modest load. It would get very very slow when anything interesting started happening, therefore keeping anything interesting from happening.

The one thing Pownce got right was:

1. It had payloads!

Three things that slowed adoption of Pownce beyond the inability to handle a load:

1. It was in private beta for a long, long time.

2. It took forever for it to get an API.

3. When the API finally came it wasn't compatible with anything.

Net-net, there were interesting things about Pownce, and we'll remember it with a certain amount of fondness.

Hopefully Leah can take what she's learned and turn out something great at SixApart.

I'd recommend: Twitter-Plus-Plus. (With lots of interop, and do the payloads thing again, they need a kick in the ass over there at Twitter to get it into their product.)





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Xperia™ Panels category submission date is now extended to January 30, 2009

The Xperia™ Panels category is now open for submissions until January 30, 2009 giving you more time to get creative using the Sony Ericsson Beta SDK for Windows Mobile 6.1. To help inspire you, here are three panel examples from Sony Ericsson’s partners: Facebook, Microsoft Windows Live and Dashwire.

· Download Sony Ericsson Beta SDK for Windows Mobile 6.1 (v1.0.4) for creating Xperia Panels>>

Entries to the Xperia Panels category are invited from any developer, both companies and individuals, who develop a panel for the Xperia X1.

The Panel category winner will be announced at Mobile World Congress. In addition, they will be invited to an exclusive two day workshop and presentation at the Sony Ericsson headquarters in Lund, Sweden where they will present their projects to top Sony Ericsson executives and spend one-on-one time with several senior Sony Ericsson directors to discuss new joint business ventures.

Xperia Panel examples

To help inspire you, here are three examples from Sony Ericsson’s partners: Facebook, Microsoft Windows Live and Dashwire. These panels are available for download from Sony Ericsson’s Fun & Downloads web site.

Facebook

The new Facebook application uses the Xperia X1 interface to deliver an intuitive version of the site, putting images of your friends onto your phone’s desktop (standby screen) and showing their latest status updates as you touch their images.

New functions available through the Xperia X1 Facebook panel include:

· An entirely new visual representation of friends’ statuses

· Simple and fast upload of photos to Facebook

· Easy access to Facebook friends list and phone numbers, with click to call capabilities

Microsoft Windows Live

The Windows Live panel uses existing Windows Live ID to sync contacts held in the X1’s phonebook, and the panel will provide easy access to an intuitive Microsoft messenger interface, including Hotmail and Live Messenger.

The panel gives end-users access to the Windows Live Search function, which is tailored to mobile phones and can be voice activated and controlled. Other Windows Live services will be incorporated into the panel throughout the year.

[Windows Mobile 6.1 Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 ]
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The American Dialect Society is now accepting nominations for the word of the year of 2008.

The best "word of the year" candidates will be:

-new or newly popular in 2008
-widely or prominently used in 2008
-indicative or reflective of the national discourse

Multi-word compounds or phrases that act as single lexical items are welcomed, as well.

Hit up their email address with your nomination.

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You might think you're some kind of l337 h4x0r because you used software to unlock your iPhone. Big deal! You've got nothing on the Vietnamese hackers that'll unlock your iPhone for you the hard way....
[iPhone Apple Cellphones Hacking iPhone 3G jailbreaking unlocking ]
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