With cloud computing becoming ever more prevalent in the consumer space for rapidly scaling Web 2.0 applications, grid computing finally delivers similarly efficient scalability to the business world. Grid computing is an impressive, confident, powerful technology model, winning high-profile admirers as it approaches full maturity.

When talking about the 'web' what are we referring to? For most people it's what can be experienced through their web browser including HTML, audio and video streaming, Flash-based animation, or rich Internet Application (RIA) interfaces. The key to this perspective is the web browser, which is viewed as essential for experiencing any type of content available via a hyperlink on the web.

As I've been stating for the past five years: if you want to provide real value to your enterprise, SOA should extend out of the firewall and into the Internet. However, this was not universally accepted by the rank-and-file SOA guys. Generally speaking, most viewed SOA as something that occurred exclusively within the firewall, and extending the reach of their SOA to Internet-based resources was taboo.

Now, what Google announced is really exciting! I'm not kidding. It's even better than I hoped. Yes, it's only Python, but IBM's PC-DOS was only BASIC and Pascal when it first came out, and it didn't matter. Yeah, I preferred C, but I coded in Pascal because that's what you had to do to get an app running. What you're going to see here that you've never seen before is shrinkwrap net apps that scale that can be deployed by civillians. That's a mouthful, but that's what's coming. Why? Because here is a standardized platform that can be stamped out in the billions of units. Maybe Google can't do it, but the perception is that they can. Who is willing to stand up and say Google hasn't nailed scaling? What PCs did in the 80s, Google is doing now. PCs took the black magic out of owning a computer.

It's what you don't see about the emerging Web that has everyone excited these days. Namely, it's the powerful application programming interfaces, or APIs. APIs are nothing new and have been traditionally cryptic and difficult to use. However, the advent of Web services along with the notion of mashups has changed the way we consider and leverage APIs going forward.

This session will provide attendees with an overview of the iPhone SDK, including discussion of the App Store, Apple's planned distribution channel for SDK applications. Keep in mind that the contents of the SDK and experiences while using it are covered under NDA, so be prepared for me to talk in generics and leave out specific details that might be covered by the NDA. I am planning on providing a quick introduction to Objective-C for those attendees who may have never seen it and might be worried that it will be difficult to code in (it isn't!).

Is Web 3.0 yet another buzzword, or is it a real turnaround in our industry? Web 1.0 was the good old web of the 1990s. In those times, all client-side changes were the result of a server round-trip. The Internet was ramping up in popularity. Web 2.0 has been a little more than just a technological evolution.

More and more enterprises are looking into how they can benefit from mashups to improve their business. Unfortunately, many of the best-known mashups today are more consumer oriented. Many mashup examples do not pay justice to the real enterprise value of mashups and they certainly don't explain why mashups are something every company needs to start using.

Front-end engineering rocks right now. The era of boring web sites is over and we're all into pushing the envelope, erasing boundaries and getting beyond whatever prevents us from building the next killer web application. New companies building quick-turnaround web products spring up like mushrooms and many an old convention of web design is cast aside to make way for quick prototyping and agile development.

Google's new-year special logo, which went live briefly as 2008 began, celebrated the 25th anniversary of TCP/IP - adopted by Arpanet on January 1st, 1983. While 'invisible' to most users, many of the layers built on top of TCP/IP are well-known even to laymen: HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), FTP (the File Transfer Protocol), SMTP and POP3, and IRC.

Centric CRM changed its name to Concursive Corporation. The name change reflects the rapid evolution of Concursive's products beyond CRM functionality. The corporate name change coincides with the release of a brand new version of the company's flagship product, Concourse Suite 5.0 (formerly Centric CRM), and is accompanied by the addition of a host of community and collaboration-oriented technologies to Concursive's portfolio of applications.

Phurnace Software, Inc. announced the general availability of its newest version, Phurnace Deliver 3.1. The latest software version provides IT operations staff with the resources they need to decrease deployment times and associated costs for faster, more cohesive enterprise Java deployments.

This is happening right now in many organizations and it extends beyond the introduction of collaboration technologies, such as wikis and blogs, to the next level of workplace interactions. Business - New software products will allow information workers to freely mix application data with publicly available Web content, in a variety of convenient formats. People - Employees, led by a new wave of Generation Y-ers entering the workforce, will forever change the way people interact with enterprise applications and information systems. Technology - Popular Web 2.0 data delivery and sharing technologies, like RSS/ATOM, AJAX, personalized homepages, tagging and social bookmarking, are open and inherently insecure.

In this session we'll talk about the notion of the Universal SOA, and how to prepare your SOA to see the outside world, and the emerging Web. It's clear that many of the services we consume and manage going forward will be services that exist outside of the enterprise, such as subscription services from guys like Salesforce.com, or perhaps emerging Web services marketplaces. This is 'outside-in' SOA, in essence reusing service in an enterprise not created by that enterprise, much as we do today with information on the Web. Thus, those services outside of the enterprise existing on the Internet create a 'Universal SOA' - ready to connect to your enterprise SOA, perhaps providing more value. This is nothing new, by the way; we've been talking Universal SOA for some time now, at least the notion, and we are just seeing bits and pieces appearing today.

Two trends in applications architecture - AJAX RIA on the client side and service-orientation on the server side - are enabling powerful enterprise solutions that can be leveraged in diverse business environments. In this session, Michael Peachy will use real-world case studies to demonstrate how organizations are taking advantage of both of these advancements in application architecture to provide AJAX rich Internet applications that double the applicability of SOA investments. Attendees will hear how to deliver feature rich, high-productivity end-user applications to the business desktop.

'Services' are everywhere, from internally focused SOAs to public services from Federal Express, eBay, Amazon and Google. But there's no 'User' in 'SOA'. And delivering services to business users can get harder when enterprise application requirements for security and availability are added to the requirements list. AJAX (and Web 2.0 in general) represents a vast improvement of client applications in terms of usability. AJAX is the future of rich enterprise application development. Developers have the opportunity to deliver new, advanced methods for data manipulation and visualization. Most important, AJAX complements the loosely coupled nature of Services perfectly. AJAX can make the perfect delivery medium for services to business users, but this synergy requires a proper architecture. JackBe's unique combination of AJAX and SOA expertise will help attendees understand the needs and solutions to create truly Enterprise AJAX solutions using AJAX and SOA.

British Telecom Openreach Portal is one of new breed open-source portal platforms that have embraced new and futuristic technologies to provide an unparalleled service to end customers. BT Openreach Portal provides the facility for UK-based communication providers (CPs) to manage and service their end customer orders ranging from a simple phone connection and Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) to fiber-based private circuits. Being largely a B2B portal, it provided Openreach standardized, silo-based services to the CPs. This provided too rigid a framework for the CPs to manage and access their orders as well as carry out the required order journeys and did not provide a CP-oriented view of data and execution. Further, the rigid deployment architecture hindered the CPs from personalizing their order journeys as well as prevented BT from deploying new or customized services. In this session we will examine how the SOA and Web 2.0 technology-based platform developed in Openreach Portal by wiring up the existing rigid flows and deploying them for execution, through Web and Web service interfaces in real-time and zero down time, gave the power to end users to define their own services and flows.

The Web was a 20-year setback for user experience. Only now are technologies and products emerging that can bring us the interactivity we traded away for access to distributed information when the Web took over. This session will present the possibilities for a highly interactive user experience, including industry best practices and war stories from the career of the speaker. In particular, he will review Web 2.0 technologies as well as the new capabilities of Microsoft's Vista operating system.

Enterprises continue to look for return on investment of their service-orientated architectures, and it is Enterprise Web 2.0 that makes this possible by connecting the last mile of SOA to end-users. This is a win-win-win solution for the enterprise; where not only IT, and end-users benefit but businesses benefits as well, from increased ROI and enhanced use and IT productivity. The last mile of SOA needs to be bridged in order for IT to fully reap the benefits of their efforts by squeezing the last bit of ROI out of their infrastructure. To achieve this, IT needs to make SOA tangible to end-users, while maintaining enterprise control and reliability. This session will explore: Service Oriented Architectures: Meaningful to IT, Intangible to End-Users, Rich Internet Applications: Meaningful to End-Users, Intangible to IT, Enterprise Web 2.0: Meaningful to Both, Controlling the Desktop Environment, Good Communication is a Must for any Relationship,Ubiquitous Consumption of Services. Attendees of this session will be able to identify the best solution to meet their SOA needs.

jMaki is an AJAX framework that provide a wrapper over rich widgets from multiple toolkits such as Yahoo!, Dojo and many others. jMaki-wrapped widgets can be easily used in a JSP, Rails, PHP and Phobos app. This session will explain what jMaki is and show using live code demos how easy it is to embed jMaki widgets in different pages.

Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 have brought IT organizations a set of capabilities to better meet the demands of business users. However, IT needs to be proactive and build processes to enable agility and creativity, and deploy these assets with appropriate enterprise-level control. What level of performance, control, compliance will ensure team success? And how can you reduce costs and development times for better enterprise value?

Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 have brought IT organizations a set of capabilities to better meet the demands of business users. However, IT needs to be proactive and build processes to enable agility and creativity, and deploy these assets with appropriate enterprise-level control. What level of performance, control, compliance will ensure team success? And how can you reduce costs and development times for better enterprise value?

Sybase, Inc. announced Sybase WorkSpace 2.0, an integrated design and development environment combining enterprise modeling, database development, data federation, Web application development and services development and orchestration in an Eclipse, open-source framework. New enhancements to Sybase WorkSpace include advanced integration with Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise, Sybase IQ and SQL Anywhere and further incorporation of Open Source technology through plug-ins such as the Eclipse Data Tooling Platform (DTP) and Services Toolkit.

In a partnership with Yahoo! and Research In Motion, the Canadian company behind the BlackBerry, JetBlue is equipping one of its Airbus A320s with a special version of WiFi that's compliant with the FCC ban on in-flight cellular communications. The result is that passengers with WiFi-enabled laptops and BlackBerry users with certain models will have airborne access to 'lightweight' versions of Yahoo! e-mail and IM.

ShoppingVale today announced the launch of its Web 2.0 Shopping Comparison Engine shoppingvale.com. Launched as a private beta in October 2007, ShoppingVale provides shoppers unbiased, unfiltered and immediate access to a variety of leading and emerging online retailers.

Extentech Inc. launched ExtenXLS 6.0 - the next version of the popular Java Spreadsheet SDK with the ability to automate functions in a spreadsheet application with an advanced Web2.0 API. In addition to spreadsheet handling available in Java, developers can now take their spreadsheet applications beyond the basics with advanced Web 2.0 spreadsheet.

JanRain announced support for OpenID 2.0. The latest version of OpenID assures its position as the dominant standard for next-generation digital identity. With new features that improve security and usability of OpenID, the user-centric single sign-on and online user-authentication standard is for mass adoption and widespread disruption across the Internet. As the primary contributor to the OpenID code base, JanRain is positioned to deliver the key applications and services that will drive exponential growth of the OpenID ecosystem in 2008 and beyond.

MX Logic, Inc. released cyber threat and managed services predictions that will impact small, medium and large businesses in 2008. 'In 2007, cyber criminals have firmly established their intentions to focus on Web 2.0 applications. This trend, coupled with the increased complexity of combined threats that are distributed through botnets, will reach critical mass in 2008,' said Sam Masiello, director of threat management at MX Logic. 'The monetary benefit criminals receive from their malicious activity will force them to become more sophisticated in their tactics. We see the ability for cyber threats to quickly morph as a catalyst for the adoption of managed security services globally.'

DreamFace Interactive, a member of the OpenAjax Alliance, provides a new way for Web-savvy business people to create, control, and share their own Web applications, through a concept called WebChannels, which makes it possible to create applications designed for change.

ArgentVive plc announced that its Retail8 Consumer Division has entered into a development agreement with Redberry Digital Ltd. The venture will advance the Company's newly launched search tool BookRabbit, into a new book buying and social network hybrid that will provide increased functionality and additional features.

Alfresco Software, Inc. announced an open source Social Computing Platform for the enterprise. The release integrates Alfresco's popular ECM software with leading Web 2.0 tools and services such as Facebook, iGoogle, Adobe Flex, MediaWiki, TypePad and WordPress.

Alfresco Software, Inc. announced the launch of Alfresco Enterprise Google Gadgets for ECM, which lets business users manage, create and edit enterprise content with traditional enterprise control from within their iGoogle homepage, and combine internal and external content and services.

A Bangalore start-up named InstaColl, co-founded, chaired and underwritten by Sabeer Bhatia, who did HotMail, which Microsoft bought in 1997 for a reported $400 million, has launched into the Office business sorta like Google, Zoho, Adobe et al with some hybrid online/offline widgetry called Live Documents. Live Documents, which unfortunately isn't live, is a suite of online productivity apps that its creators claim is the functional equivalent of Word, Excel and PowerPoint in Office 2007 matching features such as Excel's macros and table styles and PowerPoint's live preview.

'We are pleased that Estonia and Estonian entrepreneurs - through Enterprise Estonia - have chosen San Jose as their West Coast landing pad to establish strong relationships with other top global technology companies here in the Silicon Valley,' said San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed as he and members of the San Jose City Council warmly welcomed Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip to the 'Capital of Silicon Valley' last week.

Internet Evolution (http: //www.internetevolution.c om/) announced that it has added a completely original Web interface designed to help users browse the plethora of opinion stored in its ThinkerNet blogosphere. Called 'The Wisdom of Clouds,' the graphical user interface (GUI) allows site visitors to take a virtual flight through a cloud bank of all ideas generated by more than 80 world-famous contributors to the ThinkerNet, and drill down to read the ones that are of interest.

Jack Martin today announced Collaborative Democracy, which is a political framework where electors and the elected actively collaborate to attain the best possible solution to any situation using collaborative enabling technologies to facilitate wide scale citizen participation in government. Collaborative Democracy brings all people into the governing process to help civilization reach its full potential. The basic technological building blocks to enable Collaborative Democracy now exist and all that is required is that they be threaded together in a way that an average citizen can use them productively.

WaveMaker announced its new WaveMaker Visual Assembly StudioTM and Rapid Deployment Framework for Enterprise Web 2.0 applications. WaveMaker enables the visual assembly of scalable Web applications using AJAX widgets, Web services and databases. Using WaveMaker, Fortune 2000 organizations can embrace innovative Web 2.0 technologies while adhering to the architectural, security and data policies of CIOs.

A new FSBO website has been designed to streamline browsing experience to help potential home buyers and sellers with their process. Fizber.com Web 2.0 services include Drive Score, Bike Score, Street View, Climate Watch, Fizber Video, integrated Google Maps, City Profiles and Blogs.

Online Media Solutions,Ltd. announced an agreement with Lookery, LLC. The two companies will supply services and applications that enable international advertisers to target US-based publishers operating in the world of social networks, by monetizing social network applications. Social network applications, also known as 'apps' or 'widgets', are small programs that users download and run on their profiles.

Inkriti announced it has completed an agreement to AJAX-enable the web-interfaces of OATSystems. OATSystems delivers RFID-enabled solutions for industrial manufacturers, consumer product companies and retailers. These solutions enable enterprises to improve asset management, streamline assembly line operations, improve promotional effectiveness and increase on-shelf availability.