A wave of developers ranging from giants like SAP and salesforce.com to small companies like personalized Web gadget and game developer LabPixies are building extensions to the new Google Wave tool.

Google's new online tool, Wave, marries real time communications with natural language tools to let users create a "wave" and add other users to that wave, all of whom can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets and feeds from other Web sources to replace common email and other traditional communication tools.

Google has asked developers to create their own APIs for the Wave offering, and several have done so. Many of their demos can be accessed by clicking here.

SAP for instance, has shown a prototype of Gravity, which the company said provides real-time, cloud-based collaborative business process modeling within Google Wave.

Gravity, with the collaborative features of Google Wave, allows business process modeling activities to be propagated in near real-time to all other participants of the Wave, SAP said.

In its demo of Gravity, SAP showed how two merging companies could re-engineer their business processes in order to capitalize from cross-selling opportunities. Gravity color-codes each individual modeler's content, shows the history of the model, and allows both asynchronous and synchronous editing. The results could also be imported into SAP Netweaver BPM for further refinement and execution.

salesforce.com showed how Wave interacts with cloud platforms like its Force.com platform. As an example, it showed a fictitious company asking customers to register the products they purchased, and returned an e-mail address for support. That e-mail address was actually a Wave robot which gets information from the customer about a problem, identifies the customer, and tailors the interaction based on the customer's purchase and support history.

Should the customer request a live chat, Wave sends the request to the robot which then makes a request to salesforce.com to find an available representative. All the interactions between the customer and salesforce.com are included in the Wave, and can be embedded directly into a case detail page from which any support representative can carry on the conversation with the customer.

Google Wave is not only for serious business users.

LabPixies has extensions which allow multiple players to solve Sudoku puzzles together and see who is the best player in a group.

Ribbit, Mountain View, Calif., showed a beta of its Ribbit Message Gadget which allows Wave participants to connect to a Wave via a phone. The Ribbit Message Gadget displays a transcription of audio messages and attaches original audio message as MP3 files. It also includes an embedded player to let users listen to messages, with all messages and responses to requests from the Gadget automatically tracked by a Ribbit Message robot.

Other applications for which Google Wave extensions are being developed include the 6rounds live meeting point application from GixOO, an interactive itinerary application from Lonely Planet, a trip planning gadget from AccuWeather, and another trip planning application from Google Maps.

SOURCE: ChannelWeb
[Submitted by MaTiCa]



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No matter how you define the cloud -- software delivered on a per user/per month basis, or infrastructure leased on a pay-as-you-go basis -- the major stumbling block to mass adoption is, and will for the foreseeable future remain, security.

Vendors of cloud computing services, for their part, have done little to alleviate the situation, other than to assure customers that security is a major concern. The Cloud Security Alliance has only now gotten around to refining initial guidelines it issued earlier this year.

For the time being, companies who use cloud computing believe it's secure, and those who don't, well, they're not quite so sure. For those who do take this leap of faith, their willingness to overlook little things like the lack of a service level agreement has more to do with the business they're in or the expense involved with rolling their own management systems and security apparatus.

To see what I mean, just look at the sorts of data that companies are pushing to the cloud, and the sorts of companies most willing to go that route. Archie Reed, a cloud security expert who holds the rank of distinguished technologist at HP, told me that cloud adoption is very high in certain verticals, including real estate companies, retailers and government agencies. In other words, exactly the type of entities you'd expect; entities that wouldn't mind if their listings, inventory or statistics were accidentally exposed or leaked.

Financial services companies, however -- not so much. Processing data in the cloud, sure. Storing data there -- not on your life. Small and medium sized enterprises aside (where the cost-benefit analysis comes down strongly on the side of relying on cloud services), large companies with a lot to lose from a security breach are still reluctant to store their data in the cloud.

Their reticence is more than the residue of hidebound attitudes about Internet-based services; many cloud vendors don’t include security provisions in their enterprise service level agreements (when they offer SLAs at all) -- they simply point to their so-far spotless records.

For many corporate officers, that's not only too big a risk, it's a violation of their fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders, not to mention regulatory mandates in certain cases.

Why isn't security a bigger issue for those vendors? It may well be that cloud computing is a victim of its heretofore exemplary record. Maybe it's going to take a cataclysmic event -- a huge data loss suffered by a large cloud computing company -- to upend the complacency around cloud security. "If and when we see a major breach," Reed told me, "perhaps the focus will move from being 'it's a major concern' to 'it's a major priority.'"

SOURCE: The Information Week Blog

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By Diane Bartz

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Google's deal to digitize millions of books opens the way for others to enter the online book business, the company's chief legal officer said in testimony prepared for a congressional hearing on Thursday.

David Drummond, addressing critics of the project, said Google was "fully compliant with copyright law," and access to online books could revolutionize research in schools without major libraries.

The scanning project prompted a 2005 lawsuit filed by the Authors Guild, accusing Google of copyright infringement. A proposed settlement to resolve the lawsuit will be discussed on October 7 in Manhattan federal court.

As part of the settlement, Google has agreed to pay $125 million to create a Book Rights Registry, where authors and publishers can register works and receive compensation.

Rival companies, privacy advocates and some libraries, have accused Google of violating antitrust law to dominate the digital book market. The Justice Department is looking into their concerns.

Google's Drummond argued that the scanning of "orphan works" -- books whose authors cannot be found -- would make it easier for other companies to follow suit.

"We believe anyone who wants to re-use abandoned works should have a fair, legal way to do so. In our view, the settlement helps," said Drummond the testimony prepared for a U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing.

So far, the search engine giant has scanned 10 million books, including many obtained from libraries.

Some Google competitors, libraries and others said they support plans to digitize books but not the settlement.

The Open Book Alliance said the pact threatened to monopolize the access, distribution and pricing, of the largest, private digital database of books in the world.

"It would do so by using the class action mechanism to not only redress past harm, but to prospectively shape the future of digital book distribution," said the alliance in a letter to Representatives John Conyers and Lamar Smith. Conyers heads the Judiciary Committee, while Smith is the ranking Republican.

Signatories of the letter included Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon.com Inc, the New York Library Association, and small publishers like Bear Star Press. Privacy advocates like Consumer Watchdog also oppose the settlement.

The case is Authors Guild et al v Google Inc 05-08136 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (Manhattan)

(Reporting by Diane Bartz; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)

(Source: REUTERS)




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