Two of the biggest launches in Rich Internet Application history took place in 2007/2008 when Adobe launched AIR 1.0 in February '08 and Microsoft launched Silverlight (September '07). At the 6th International AJAXWorld RIA Conference & Expo in October SYS-CON Events is delighted to be presenting major industry keynotes from the two industry executives with overall responsibility for both of those massive richer-web initiatives: Adobe's CTO Kevin Lynch and Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's .NET Developer Platform.

Reminding people of how its backing was the making of Linux, IBM, to no one's surprise, has thrown its support behind cloud computing, that delicious nexus of every chi-chi buzzword technology currently in vogue: Web 2.0, rich Internet applications, software-as-a-service, SOA, grid computing, Web Services, virtualization and utility computing. IBM calls its initiative Blue Cloud - like it could have another name - and claims it's a 'game-changing model for Internet-scale computing,' providing customer with just the right size computer power while at one and the same time being 'green' as well as 'self-healing and self-managing' based on open standards and Linux. Lordy, if this thing was a cute guy with money, it would be every mother's dream.

4D announced the release of 4D Web 2.0 Pack v11 Release 2. The new version, a combination of two products - 4D AJAX Framework and 4D for Flex - brings a powerful set of tools, plug-ins, and components that allow 4D developers to harness the power of Web 2.0 technologies, and deliver live web and rich internet applications to browsers, desktops, and portable devices such as the iPhone.

'While the last decade was focused on the Web, the next phase in the evolution of our industry will be on the convergence of Web, mobile and desktop applications and the ability to extend existing applications with these new technologies for a consistent user experience regardless of how and where the information is viewed,' says newly appointed Nexaweb CTO Jeremy Chone in this Exclusive Q&A with SYS-CON Media's Jeremy Geelan.

Scrapboy Digital Media Corporation announced the availability of Scrapboy, its Facebook desktop application, to users in North America. Scrapboy allows users to stay connected with their friends' Facebook activities on their desktops and store those activities securely on the users' computers, not a remote server.

Web 2.0 tools are doing a wonderful job of providing consumers with cool and productive new ways of performing common, simple tasks over the Internet. These tools primarily perform a single task such as allowing consumers to manage their photos, read their favorite newsfeeds, express themselves online through blogs, and communicate with friends via social networks.

InteleCom announced that its new Web 2.0 Social Network toksee successfully launched 3 new viral communication tools or widgets for easy copy and placement on websites and blogs. All 3 immediately received top rankings from Widgetbox. The toksee chat or video messaging widget allows toksee Members to talk with and see their friends and family who also have the toksee online conference system.

SL Corporation announced the availability of RTView version 5.0. This latest release allows users to mix and match a variety of Web 2.0 technologies - including AJAX and Flash - to deliver the most efficient real-time visibility applications for their needs, without requiring any technical knowledge of the Web 2.0 technologies.

myStaffingPro has added new Web 2.0 functionality into their clients' career search screens. The free enhancement expands upon the applicant's current ability to sign up for a career RSS feed. The RSS feed enables prospective applicants to sign up and receive new job positings directly on their feed reader or Google homepage. This feature provides one-click access to review a newly opened position and apply without having to manually visit the client's career search screen.

Often called the Semantic or Pervasive Web, Web 3.0 brings a level of artificial intelligence to transform the Internet from a searchable catalog to a personal guide that can reason in a human-like fashion and provide users with more services and options for social networks. This session will map out the world of Web 3.0, exploring the unique benefits for end users, as well as opportunities for businesses. Using specific examples, Jon Doyle will demonstrate how Web 3.0 will change the way users interact with the Web - from planning and booking an entire vacation to automatically scheduling doctor's appointments based on personal preferences.

Web applications continue to evolve to support a far richer user experience than in the early days of the Internet. However, delivering these solutions adds complexity and demands additional programming skills. This session provides an overview of how the innovative IBM Rational technology delivered through its new Enterprise Generation Language (EGL) capabilities, helps dramatically simplify the construction of rich user interfaces and their integration with back-end services, transactional systems, and data sources for any platform, including System z and System i. This revolutionary approach enables companies to leverage their valuable IT assets into state-of-the-art SOA-based and web solutions in record time while leveraging existing skills.

SQL injection attacks are evolving as one of the primary modes of transportation for malicious scripts that hackers insert into legitimate websites. According to recent events, this method is becoming very popular among the hacker elite, especially considering the number of sites they are able to exploit almost overnight.

Brace yourself for a new era of creative web addresses. ICANN, the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has opened up top-level domains, the little .com, .org, .gov, .edu, .net suffixes or country abbreviation at the end of a web address, to any styling the human mind can conceive - and in scripts other than Roman - provided the creator coughs up $100,000.

Nowadays we can observe changes going on in management and especially project management in organizations. More and more, organizations are abandoning top-down management style. Among them are the New York Times, Tribune Co., Ernst & Young and many others. Even the world biggest corporations, such as Toyota and IBM, are trying to implement bottom-up management style elements in some of their departments.

Progress Software has acquired Mindreef, a provider of SOA service validation and testing tools. Mindreef will be fully integrated into Progress Software, and will adopt the Progress Software company name. Progress expects to retain most Mindreef product names, however, this will be reviewed over the months following the acquisition.

It's important to remember that there is a huge resource being created on the Web these days in terms of both services and content. This includes access to SaaS applications (that are better than their enterprise-bound counterparts), service marketplaces, and even mash-able applications that you can mix and match with other Web 2.0 applications / APIs / services or enterprise applications / services to quickly solve business problems.

AccuRev announced a new AJAX-based Web Interface and a native integration with Microsoft Windows Explorer for its process-centric software change and configuration management (SCCM) solution. These new capabilities make it easy to integrate every knowledge worker into the development process and offer new ways to share information.

The number of subscribers using mobile Internet services will rise from 577 million currently, to top 1.7bn by 2013, spurred by demand for collaborative applications known collectively as 'Web 2.0', and greater 2.5/3G penetration. Established mobile players face increasing competition from web-based brands and will have to adapt their commercial strategies to accommodate greater collaboration with other members of the value chain, if future revenue growth in the mobile Web 2.0 space is to be achieved.

Project Insight has released Project Scorecard, a project scoring system that enables companies to measure projects on how they fit into corporate goals and objectives. With the recent economic downturn, businesses are hard-pressed to prioritize major projects and determine whether or not they meet company strategies.

Curl has made available the newest example of a Curl Nitro 'fit client' application. Designed by Manuel Lima, the founder of VisualComplexity.com, the CurlGraph features a visual representation of the social graph of individual Facebook members. Using the desktop-based application, users can visualize a circle of up to 128 friends from an established Facebook account, enabling them to see relationships and navigate through that friend data to find the information they want.

Jaspersoft announced the availability of its new Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite v3 Professional Edition. Jaspersoft v3 marks a major milestone for open source business intelligence software by providing rich enterprise-class functionality delivered through state-of-the-art interactive Web 2.0 interfaces.

The demand for and widespread usage of popular video sharing sites, communities of interest, social networking and personalization has increased exponentially in the past year. While multimedia services and usage are at all time highs in terms of minutes of use, service providers and content owners are still adjusting their revenue and go-to-market models toward consumers and enterprises.

Over recent years the web has seen the growth of so-called 'Web 2.0' services based around the concept of a two-way information flow, and the empowering of individuals to create and publish their own content and information through blogs, wikis, video sharing, and social networking services. Video content is often central to these services, allowing the uploading and sharing of content generated by customers, along with the emergence of video advertising on the web.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that mashups are moving from things that are conceptual and fun, to things that are productive and businesslike. The fact is, developers are leveraging mashups to solve all sorts of business problems these days, and the speed to production and the value of these little applications is compelling.

IBM announced IBM Mashup Center will be hosted as a free trial on the Web with which non-technical business people can use to experiment and build customized mashups following the success of early corporate adopters Boeing Corporation and Carrefour Group. On schedule for mid-year delivery, the IBM Mashup Center allows business people to create situational applications, or mashups, by remixing information from anywhere to gain business insight and do their jobs smarter and more effectively. Using IBM's mashup technology, even non-technical users will be able to exploit standards and Web-based technology to gain access to myriad information, such as Web sites and feeds, spreadsheets, databases, applications, unstructured text from an email, video, audio and other information on the Web, and make sense of it all in minutes.

When picturing the relationship between the enterprise and the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model, imagine an evolutionary process that can be divided into three main stages: 'The Comfort Zone,' 'The Enlightenment,' and 'The Re-Assessment.' Once we examine these, we can then decide on the right course of action when choosing how to adapt to the IT demands of the enterprise.

IBM announced it will establish the first Cloud Computing Center for software companies in China, which will be situated at the new Wuxi Tai Hu New Town Science and Education Industrial Park in Wuxi, China. The center will offer emerging Chinese software companies the ability to tap into a virtual computing environment to support their development activities. It will be established through an agreement signed today between IBM and Wuxi Tai Lake Industry Investment and Development Company Limited.

This is a checklist of items you need for an all-encompassing personal branding strategy. Personal branding is the process of marketing and selling yourself as a brand in order to gain success in business. Personal branding is a continual process just as knowing yourself is a continual process. As you grow, so does your brand. The need for personal branding arises from the fact that globalization has increased competition in the workplace. As the wheat is separated from the chaff, if you are left standing, you are left standing with others of good caliber. The playing field is now that much more challenging since your competition is as good as, or better, than you.

BigSpeed Computing announced the release of BigSpeed Secure Socket Library 3.0. BigSpeed Secure Socket Library is an ActiveX control that simplifies and accelerates the development of proprietary communication solutions over the Internet. It implements a flexible message-oriented protocol on top of a single TCP connection with on-the-fly data scrambling.

All new or emerging businesses are rightfully cautious of the big investment required to launch a successful web presence. A new cost-effective and time-saving service enables companies to fast track their strategic and tactical web initiatives while still actively growing their user base. Unlike past methods of web development, rapid prototyping is a back-to-front development process that allows the product user interface to be fully designed before writing any code.

TopQuadrant has announced the general availability of TopBraid Live 2.0, a semantic application deployment platform that simplifies the creation of web services to a 'click and connect' process. Users can connect data from RDF stores, relational databases, spreadsheets, email, RSS feeds, as well as data in HTML and XML formats, without the need to understand programming languages. A new Flex API creates graphical 'information spaces' as the output, which allow users to browse dynamic information by following graphical links.

Research and Markets has announced the addition of 'Web 2.0 Server and Push Technology Market Shares Strategies, and Forecasts, 2008 to 2014' to their offering. Advertising budgets have not been directly connected to the computer and technology before the Web 2.0 companies started attracting advertising dollars. The massive reach of Google has attracted to advertising dollars into the computer industry. Even thought the proportion of total advertising spending on Internet advertising is relatively low, the impact on the computer industry is large.

Force10 Networks announced that Etsy has deployed the TeraScale E-Series family of switch/routers and the S-Series family of access switches to increase the performance and reliability of its online marketplace for handmade arts and crafts. The scalability and resiliency of the Force10 solution enables Etsy to support millions of customer page views and transactions while providing the capability to seamlessly expand as more than 50,000 new buyers join the marketplace each month.

Adobe Thursday turned its little piece of Disneyland for developers loose. The pre-release of Flash Player 10, a k a 'Astro,' which promises richer, more immersive Web 2.0 experiences, has gone to public beta ahead of general availability sometime later this year. It adds custom filters and effects, native 3D transformation and animation, extensible rich text layout and GPU hardware acceleration. Adobe thinks it's a game changer about what can go on the web.

Zapatec introduced the Zapatec AJAX E-mail Client, the second in a series of self-contained modules designed for integration into Web 2.0 applications. Zapatec's AJAX E-mail Client enables developers to add needed web-based e-mail functionality to their applications, freeing them to focus on their core business.

Infragistics announced the availability of Infragistics NetAdvantage for JSF 2008 Volume 1 enabling web developers to leverage the power of JavaServer Faces to create compelling User Interfaces (UI). This new release provides a comprehensive package of AJAX-enabled JSF UI components for building commercial Web 2.0 applications in J2EE environments. With the ability to create re-useable components, NetAdvantage for JSF 2008 Volume 1 helps Java enterprise developers create consistent experiences with less code in less time.

frevvo announced Live Forms software which enables users and developers to easily create rich AJAX forms with built-in business capabilities. Live Forms provides a complete Web-based design experience that can be embedded into any application and is ideal for Enterprise Social Software companies, BPM/SOA vendors, Web hosting providers and solution providers.

ShoZu announced that it has expanded its mobile social media service to Photobucket, Dailymotion, Friendster, Twitter and four additional Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 communities. With these eight new integrations, ShoZu now enables mobile users to interact with their choice of 36 social networks from a single screen on their handsets - reducing the time, effort and money required to upload images, update social profiles and check friends' latest posts from the phone.

Building on its November 2007 preview, Oracle previewed additional planned feature enhancements of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g. Based on feedback resulting from close cooperation with customers testing in real-world environments, the latest preview of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g includes planned features intended to provide Java developers with a unified design and development experience based on new open standards for Java, SOA, AJAX, Web 2.0 and Security and to help reduce the time, effort and cost of developing Rich Enterprise, Web and mobile applications.