Blogs

There is an interesting race going on right now among some of the largest technology players. It is a race to fully develop out the new cloud services operating model. This race has long term implications for everyone in the technology space, because once components of this model become available as-a-service, the consumers of the services start to care less about what is running them. So, whether the back-end uses a database from Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, or the open source MySQL, it ends up not mattering as much. It simply becomes a service.

In March 2009 Dennis Berman of the Wall Street Journal posed a question, in reference to the economy, “Where exactly is growth going to come from?” He pointed out that the finance, insurance, and real-estate industries were the greatest contributors to growth between 2003 and 2007, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data. Considering the state of those industries right now, Berman poses an interesting question.

Cloud Middleware is the logical evolution of traditional middleware solutions: making them available as a service, reducing complexity, readily increasing adoptability, and eliminating the need for new infrastructure. Unfortunately, a majority of cloud offerings simply take traditional solutions and begin hosting them. By making a solution hosted in-the-cloud, they succeed in eliminating a developer’s or company’s need to buy new infrastructure to run it, but they utterly fail to fulfill a fundamental promise of the cloud operating system model – reducing complexity.

Founding a technology startup is no trivial matter. Managing it through various research & development stages to an actual commercial release was fraught with countless successes and failures. Some have heard me mutter, if I could only start over again I could have done it in a 1/3rd of the time and for a 1/3rd of what I spent. But alas, a requirement of bringing a startup to fruition is staying grounded in reality, not dwelling on time travel, and assigning the lessons of the journey to experience gained.

I’ve been reading a lot about the Smart Grid recently. This is an exciting step towards wide adoption, and even government funding, for the smart revolution. This post is written to help you get up to speed.

Linxter will be presenting at the fifth annual South Florida .NET Code Camp. The event is scheduled for February 7th 2009 from 7:30am to 5:45pm at DeVry University in Miramar, FL. There will be approximately 50 speakers presenting on a variety of topics, including Frameworks, Online Services (Cloud Computing), Web Development, Agile Architecture, Clients, SQL Server, and Business Intelligence. Linxter will be presented by CEO Jason Milgram under the Frameworks track.

With all the talk of clouds and restful services, one might feel the tech world is full of new concepts these days, but really it all comes back to service-oriented architecture (SOA). There are few new concepts floating around, just more widespread adoption that make standards more exciting than ever. It’s no wonder this 5 year old term is popping up in blogs all across the web.

Beta 3.1 officially released today! Please check out our updated SDK and documentation at http://linxterdeveloper.com. You’ll find we’ve added three more Quick Starts for download. Each Quick Start builds upon the previous to demonstrate various functionalities of Linxter…

Michael Vizard of eWeek published the first formal write-up on Linxter this morning. There’s nothing like working at a tech startup and getting to the point where you are releasing the product. More importantly: this means that our work going forward can be more involved with our developer community.

Recently, the price of text messaging offered by major wireless carriers has been a hot topic in the news. Working for a tech firm – that provides a technology for data exchange – makes me wonder: why is there such a huge markup on SMS? Text messages, after all, are just data.