Dave Johnson

June 22nd, 2007

The Popfly project over at Microsoft looks pretty interesting if not just a cheap rip off of Yahoo! Pipes.

I just wanted to comment not on the application itself but an interesting thing that I noticed when looking at the list of people on the team - all of whom I am sure are very smart and skilled people. But here is the list of titles of the team members.

Group Program Manager, Program Manager, Developer, Developer, Program Manager, Program Manager, Engineering Manager, Test Developer, Developer, Product Manager, Developer, Program Manager, Program Manager, Product Unit Manager, Developer.

This can be summed up nicely in a simple graph.

Coming from a small company with something more like a 10 to 1 ratio of developers to managers I can’t help but feel somewhat bewildered! It just makes it even more amazing that large software companies don’t just crumble under the immense weight of the bureaucratic bloat.

Posted in Web, AJAX, Business, popfly | 4 Comments »

September 15th, 2006

Interesting email came in this morning. The OpenAjax alliance had been invited (to our greatest surprise and dismay) to take part in a podcast series about Ajax with the analyst firm ZapThink. At first thought it seems very reasonable. However, when you actually read the small print (ok it wasn’t that small) they wanted people to pay $5000 for the chance to talk on their podcast! Of course they are gracious enough to give people referred by IBM - who are a driving force behind OpenAjax - a whopping $1000 discount. Well sign me up!

They try to sell the idea to us by saying that they have literally _hundreds_ of downloads per podcast! I mean come on. Even the no good useless pukes that are Dave, Andre and Alexei were able to quickly pass the century download mark with our little audio recording about Ajax.

The real icing on the cake comes when they try to justify the price by saying:

There is a cost involved - in part to defray the costs of producing and distributing the podcast, and in part because as sponsors they get marketing visibility and leads.

Oh that’s right - the large costs associated with podcasting like that $29.95 for the headset and maybe some sort of opensource recording software. If it weren’t for the high cost I am sure that more people would be flocking to podcasts … It reminds me of the talk we had with ZapThink a while back. No wonder so many people are happy to talk to Redmonk. The greatest part about them is that we did a podcast with Cote (granted it was the podcast from hell) and we didn’t have to pay with anything but our time!

I think we will try charging the next people that come on our podcast

technorati tags:ajax, podcast, redmonk, zapthink

Posted in AJAX, Business, Podcast, Fun, Redmonk | 1 Comment »

September 14th, 2006

We have been up all night but to no avail - Alexei is gone home dreary eyed and even Andre has headed back to Squamish.

James and I will be here for a little while still as we push to get the release out before the weekend.

Stay tuned.

Posted in Web, Business, Grid | No Comments »

September 7th, 2006

Ok so we have set a date of Sept 14 for launching the latest version of our Grid control. Given some quality control issues in the last release we are trying to tighten her down and get her ready to work nicely with our framework. Best of all the docs will be kick ass

Once we launch then I can get my GMaps mashup online too!

Posted in AJAX, Business, Declarative Programming, Grid | No Comments »

August 11th, 2006

For those that have not had Samuel L. call them from the Snakes on a Plane website then get on it!

http://snakesonaplane.varitalk.com/

This has to be the best viral marketing campaign I have heard (pun intended) in a long time.

Technorati Tags: marketing, snakesonaplane, business

Posted in Business, Fun | No Comments »

July 20th, 2006

It’s official. We have _finally_ changed our name to Nitobi from the ever difficult to remember and google “eBusiness Applications”. We are slowing moving the brand over and the blogs will eventually change but I will let everyone know when it happens and try to make the transition as smooth as possible.

The name comes from a garden here in Vancouver (said to be the most authentic Japanese Tea Garden in North America) that is named after Dr. Inazo Nitobe who spent much of his life bridging the Japanese and North America cultures.

As for the logo, that is not only similar to the mathematical symbol for Pie (3.141592…). But most importantly it represents a part of our Canadian heritage, which is the inukshuk. Inukshuks were/are used as directional markers by the Inuit of the Canadian arctic.

I would love to hear people’s feedback about it!

Technorati Tags: nitobi, ebusinessapps, ebusinessapplications, inukshuk

Posted in Business | 4 Comments »

June 1st, 2006

We have been uber busy writing the old book and getting lots of JavaScript written these days so blogging has been on the backburner a bit

I did get a chance to finally take a peak at some Web API’s today in hopes of finding one I liked to make a mash-up using our AJAX Grid product. I think that I might try out the eBay one since they have some good sample code and it should be real easy to integrate - plus the data is pretty well suited to a grid format of course. Aside from the actual API, the thing that had me most interested was their user agreement - which I surprisingly actually read!

The interesting part was where they say that:

You may not co-mingle, modify or display the eBay Content with the content of third parties … the eBay Content is segregated from non-eBay content, and the eBay Content must be presented in such a way that the eBay Content is visually separate (as with lines or color changes) from non-eBay Content (�eBay Area�); and no third party listings, information or other content of any kind may be combined with eBay Content or displayed anywhere within the eBay Area;

In this day and age of share and share alike in the new Web 2.0, that sort of license seems pretty draconian. However, I think that this behaviour is a great example of the difference between the old (circa 1998) and new webs (today); during the dark ages of the old web there existed what some might consider to be “real” businesses that have now grown to be the data providers - of course data or information is the fuel on which the new web relies. The fresh young face of the new web of hippie-free-lovin mash-up is built largely on the hard work of those companies that survived the first Internet bubble and have accumulated a large amount of _very_ valuable data. As Bill predicted back in the day - content is king. Of course Bill is still doing ok I am sure. Going forward it will be interesting to see if and how the various Web 1.0 (for lack of a better term) powerhouses start charging for access to all their tightly guarded data.

Technorati Tags: ebay webapi web2.0 business

Posted in Web2.0, Business | 2 Comments »

May 24th, 2006

Well, Captain AJAX and I finally got around to making our first podcast! It is a bit long and the audio sucks but we will be sure to get that fixed for next time . Anyhow, Dre and I just talked about everything that happened in the past coupld weeks including Dre’s findings down at JavaOne, The AJAX Experience, DCamp and NetBeans Day.

We also talked about the launch of Nitobi Grid V3…and what's to come down the road - WARNING - could be considered shameless self promotion but we also talk about some AJAX technology stuff

Here is the podcast care of Audioblo. If anyone has any tips about posting and or making the old podcasts then let us know!

Technorati Tags: ajax podcast javaone ajaxexperience

Posted in Web2.0, AJAX, JavaScript, XML, Architecture, Business, Flex, Declarative Programming, Components | No Comments »

May 15th, 2006

Andre is taking his getting all the AJAXy goodness he can these days while down at the down in the Bay Area. Check out his schedule here and give him a shout if you want to talk AJAX (from usability to coding) or just grab a beer

Posted in Web, AJAX, Business | 1 Comment »

May 5th, 2006

I just deleted a nice post with an overview of the Grid V3 beta and am too busy to re-write it all

It seems like I have had no time to blog or read anything in the past few weeks thanks to our agressive development schedule (not to mention book writing, presentation making and all that). The only posts I have time to put up these days are about our alpha and beta releases I am such a self promoter - damn entrepreneurs. I digress.

You can download the beta here and try it out. Don’t be too surprised to see some bugs or missing features. We are working fast and furious to meet some tight deadlines and also want to keep the product quality _very_ high. Any missing features from the beta will either be in the final release or in the first point release.

We are still working out some of the kinks with our Nitobi component framework that will be powering all our future development but it should be worth it. I will be posting some screencasts shortly (like Godfrey’s about JSF) covering some of the important new features and take a look at some of the code as well.

Posted in AJAX, Business, Declarative Programming, Components | No Comments »