I was cleaning up an old laptop recently, organizing all my applications. In my clean up I checked out some of the lists of open source applications people use and pimped myself out with the latest - Miro was a good one I just picked up for podcast, while Juice I tried and dropped. This is just my list of useful applications and way to keep the links in one place for future reference. I found good stuff in this post and the comments as well.

Standard Applications


Being creative



Listening In Keeping Up


Utility




And for that friend who asked for some utility stuff for windows which was open source




Can you match icons to the application name? (All of the images already link to correct project homes).

• Open Office
• Firefox (+webdeveloper)
• Thunderbird (+lightning, +google calendar provider)
• Gimp
• Inkscape
• Blender
• Freemind
• Kompozer (NVU)
  
• Miro
• Audacity
• X-Chat
• Pidgin
• 7 Zip
• ClamAv/ClamWin
• Putty
• HTTrack
• Truecrypt
• KeepPass
• Startup Manager
• Notepad 2
• Virtual Win
• PDF Creator
• Sumatra PDF
• ClamWin
  

It's great to be in amazement. His excitement, his wonder of the colors. Of course he ran around the rest of the afternoon pretending this was a web shooter and that he was spiderman!

A Random Walk Down Wall Street

Just finished up the book "A Random Walk Down Wall Street". It is required reading for my finance course, first few chapters anyway. Started it while on vacation and could not really put it down. I would call this book an excellent perspective, must read before you try to game the market.

However, just to add my 2 cents.
1. The market would not be a random walk if it were not for all the schemes people attempt. Each scheme forces the market to be random. I believe the systematic risk of a any given stock is based on the risk of the leadership of such company. Strong leadership, strong business. Read "Good to Great" to understand. The measurement of risk based on numbers at best (in my opinion) can only be used to predict some for of short run direction. As this information is no better than a chartist and any scheme would just serve to further "A Random Walk".

2. I did not see "Game Theory" discussed at all in the book, though I am sure there must be something out there on the topic. My guess is that unsystematic risk driven by plain old schemes, behavioral finance theory and even arbitrage are no more than forms of game theory. The real scheme would be if everyone learned from each other and played some form of tit-for-tat game theory. However with combination of independent and institution players and the global competitiveness this would not be possible.

As it relates to risk vs return, higher risk in the market only produces more returns for those in control of the risk. If others now your risk they can play against it (sounds game theory to me).

Moral of the story?
a. Long run thinking will be productive, assuming everyone else is coming up with schemes.
(corollary - There could be a situation of long run game theory which destroys you and the market)
b. Short run schemes can pay off, but its not much better than luck and gambling. Even the greatest theory could be undermined with others playing game theory against you. And hence timing of taking your money would just be luck.

Welcome to the Widgets web

It started innocent, I came across widgetbox and said sure I can write a widget. 7 Blidgets, 2 remote SWF widgets, and 2 social shout out widgets later I was wondering more about widgets. (Obligatory link to wikipedia). So did a little digging and found the following ( this is what I found, let me know if there is more )

• 9 Platforms for widgets
• 3 main technologies for web widgets
• 10 desktop widget systems
• 12 Million in funding I can find,
• 2 Companies internally funding platforms (Fox and Vendio)
• Mark Cuban funded one of them (undisclosed amount)
• Mobile widget providers are popping up (found 3 but did not look that hard)
• W3C? is driving a standard for this
• 2 Widget conferences

And I found one great post which lays the whole thing out.

My Take I have not written widgets yet for all the platforms, though I think the simplicity of widgetbox enables creation, distrubtion, management with just knowledge of the basics (html and/or javascript). Want to go deeper then write some flash. I am impressed with yourminis, but not so much for the widget platform, rather for the potential of a "Social Desktop".

Most of the folks in this space are concentrating (at least from my perspective) on the ad network, I am not sure if the intention is to be the ad network or be the a channel for the ad network and claim a slice of the pie. They each seem to promote the number of widgets deployed, which I guess represents the amount of web-space they have access to. Bigger your network bigger your valuation. It also seems their biggest distribution is the blogging universe and the social platforms likes facebook/myspace. Myspace has SpringWidgets? , Yahoo has widgets, Google has theirs, MS has theirs, Apple has something, and note for most of these there is not only a widget concept but a layer which enables you to integrate closer to their core platform. I would expect (probably already exists) a widget platform which has default integration with MyFace? and one which is focused on 'mashups', maybe a QED-Mashup-Widget-Maker. I figure that a good exit for these companies would be acquisition by a core social or similar platform, widgets are important to a platform (because they offer front sidemulti-sided market platform dynamics). There is definitely one platform / company which is seems to resonate across all widget makers, "Adobe, all your widgets are belong to us."

I am by far not an expert on widgets, just writing my impressions so far.

Widgets I wrote, writing, or just playing with

WidgetBoxWidgetsIWrote

List of widget based Systems

Widget Platforms

• Widget Box blog
  • 1.5 Million in funding
• Widgipedia blog
  • Launched by Vendio (internal funding?)
• Your Minis blog
  • Mark Cuban funding, undisclosed
• Spring Widgets blog
  • Fox Interactive platform
• Widgetop blog
  • Unknown
• Clear Spring blog
  • 5.5 Million second round
• MuseStorm blog
  • 1 Million in funding
• Snipperoo blog
  • Unknown
• Gigya
  • 4 Million from Benchmark

Widgets Tech

• HTML
• FLASH
• JAVA

Common Desktop Widget Systems

• Yahoo Widgets blog
• Google Gadgets desktop API Blog Desktop Blog
• Apollo or Air
• MS Sidebar Gadgets
• Desktop X
• Kapsules
• Samurize
• Klipfolio blog
• Ave Desk
• Apple Dashboard

Mobile Widget Systems

• Plusmo blog
• Widgetop
• Widsets blog
  • Funded by Nokia

Browser Extension

• Firefox Extensions
• Opera Widgets

Standards for Widgets

• http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-widgets-reqs-20070705/

Widget Conference

• http://www.widgetcon.com/
• http://widgetslive.com/

Widget Business Model conversations and observations

• http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2007/03/yawp_yet_anothe.html
• http://www.sexywidget.com/my_weblog/2007/02/making_sense_of.html
• http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/2007/03/another_view_on.html
• http://coloradostartups.com/2007/01/28/big-or-bullshit-widgets/

HP Acquires Opsware... don't they have Novadigm?

I heard the ground rumbling all the way from the valley today.. The blast of emails about HP and Opsware where my tsunami. Major props to Opsware for growing and executing on the business plan. More consolidation in this space is never surprising, but it does seem like we have an oligopoly in this market. So much so it is controlled by the 'Big Four' as they market refers to them.

But what surprises me is a few years back HP acquired Novadigm and in this article even questioned how would the relationship with Opsware and Altiris (acquired by Symantec) continue. The question I wonder is why couldn't HP/Novadigm execute in the space.

* Maybe the answer is the target markets are different and they are complementary and now they could take on the market.
* Maybe HP made the wrong bet, and 120+M for Novadigm is an excusable rounding error.
* Maybe it was the leadership/execution and now there is different leadership from the top through their software division.

Short term I think this is a good move for HP, they keep shaking up the software organization enough no one will ever figure out if they executing well or just keep falling forward. But they have enough of the forward momentum they have solidified their spot in the Big Four for some time.

So.. WHO, really WHO, is left in the mid market do anything unique?

Lucene Tag Cloud Generator

I wrote a tag cloud generator for Lucene, examples of it include

• Richard Friedman Blog
• Examples

The generator is written as Nutch Plugin for no good reason ;)

I build the cloud from reading the lucene index and pruning it down. It is pruned down by a junk words file which can be used to control how it gets pruned down.
Once I build the list I run a javascriipt file passing in the results, and then the javascript outputs the cloud.
There are a few files to all of this....

JavaSourceCode
The source code requires lucene. Though I wrote it as a Nutch plugin, it does not depend on Nutch.

JunkWordsFile
The junk word file contains terms, and some options.
The options are baked into the code.

The words do not support regex, they are just matched.
Options inlucde

-numbers - ignore numbers
-smallwords - skips words with three or less chars
-dashes - ignore terms with dashes
-# : comments are also supported with #

JavaScriptFile
This file converts into HTML and uses CSS to dress the cloud.

CloudCssFile
CSS file is modified off an example i found in a php tag cloud project.

Enterprise 2.0 Slideshare Read-Through

Watching tech videos on youtube gets boring real quick. No offense to the speakers, being one of them, most are not that exciting. The points made can be summarized pretty quickly and better absorbed through the presentation material, which was worked on for a longer period of time than the presentation itself (sometimes). I am getting to be a fan of SlideShare and recently dove into quite a few slideshare presentations about Web 2.0.

Good Reads
By far #1 - Wikinomics



Meet Charlie - Quick read, but message is we are all going to work online.
Dissecting Blogs - 63 slides, but broken down fairly well. Always good to learn from others experiences.
Community Hotbeds (Jams) : Any insight into IBM is worthwhile, but slide 30 of 47 was interesting. Creates a visual network of connections via your emails. Within a large company I think this information would be valuable to understand how and who people interact with. Maybe even used to automate building networks.
Sowing the seeds of Enterprise 2.0 - Good visuals in a preso, will be using this style myself. But I like this quote in defining 'enterprise 2.0' "The future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet"
Enterprise 2.0 Case Study - Great style for 172 slides! Found this to be motivational.


Somewhere in the middle of the road
Enterprise 2.0 - Trying to make the jump from web 2.0 to enterprise 2.0 by adding the concept of the tacit media. I am not sure I follow, and from what I do grok, not sure I agree.
Enterprise 2.0 : Folks working on defining Enterprise 2.0, but still does not have me convinced in the definition.

Don't rush to read.
Enterprise 2.0 Keynote - Wiki this, wiki that, but I think the message is 'distribution is disruption'.
Enterprise 2.0 - 3 slides on saying Web 2.0 in the enterprise is Enterprise 2.0. Not sure I buy this one.
Social Software - It's in German but found some interesting sites/links in there.
YouPlus - pitch for youplus?
Moss vs Mediawiki - I just suggest taking a look at the wiki comparison site.

Link for the full list on Slide Share is here.

Sribd has a collection of Web2.0 documents, but unorganized and many are not worthwhile.