Archive for September, 2008

Big Day for Tech Announcements: Google Android Phone and Adobe CS4

Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008

It’s a busy day for technology reporters today, with big announcements coming from both Adobe and Google. Today marks the official introduction of Creative Suite 4 (CS4) from Adobe. This new suite of software, tools and technologies is geared to ease the transition of content from print, to the web, to the interactive world. CS4 comes in four main editions:

  • Design Premium
  • Web Premium
  • Production Premium
  • Master Collection

The full suite, packaged as the Master Collection, contains thirteen individual products, fourteen technologies, and seven hosted services. Together these elements are designed to streamline the designer/developer workflow, saving time, promoting integration and creating content that easily scales across media and devices. The preview this morning was impressive, particularly for the enhancements that allow export from InDesign directly to Flash, and for the content-aware image editing functions that were added to Photoshop. It’s worth checking out on Adobe TV.

The other big announcement of the day is the launch of the first mobile phone that leverages the Google Android platform. Launched by T-Mobile and built by HTC, the G1 with Google phone is expected to give the iPhone a run for its money. The G1 with Google includes features such as a touch screen with slide-out QWERTY keyboard and one-hand trackball navigation, a 3MP Camera, full HTML web-browser, one-touch access to Google applications, a host of useful pre-installed applications, pre-installed access to the Amazon MP3 store, and access to the Android Market (a competitor to the Apple AppStore), the phone looks interesting on paper at least. Gartner is estimating that Android will capture 10% of the smartphone market by 2011. Certainly not an iPhone killer, but an interesting contender.

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Retailers Up eCommerce Spend: Focus on SaaS Options

Thursday, September 11th, 2008

A recent Internet Retailer report includes some interesting information about how retailer are addressing their eCommerce needs in today’s leaner market. While 72 percent of retailers are planning to purchase new eCommerce applications or services this year, what they are spending their money on is changing. New investments are focused on technologies that are critical and will produce the most business.

A big change is that web retailers are taking advantage of more affordable hosted software and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications to update their e-commerce platforms. The survey finds that 29.3 percent of merchants are implementing SaaS applications in lieu of more costly licensed software options. The on-demand SaaS options provide merchants with two key advantages, they are quick to implement and roll-out and they often provide instant access to new features.

It looks like SaaS is making inroads across many markets these days.

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Browser War Heats Up with Chrome

Monday, September 8th, 2008

Last week, Google added some heat to the web browser market when it introduced its newest offering, Google Chrome, a web browser designed to better support rich Internet applications (RIAs). In just one week, this browser jumped in popularity to claim over 4 percent of the market share. What’s interesting when you look at these numbers is where the market share is coming from. Firefox dropped in popularity from 72.9 percent down to 67.5 percent and Opera too dropped slightly from 3.51 percent to 3.47 percent. At the same time, Internet Explorer gained ground, moving from 18.18 percent to 20.08 percent.

What does this all mean? If Chrome continues to pick up market share, then this means another new browser for web developers to add to their test platforms. So far, Chrome is a Windows-only offering and it still lacks a number of the key features that advanced users crave, such as add-ons and extensions. However, Google has indicated that both of these items will be resolved quite quickly.

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RIAs in the Enterprise

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

Over the past few weeks, there have been some interesting developments that support our predictions that RIAs will become a trend in the enterprise over the coming year. The first move came from ReadWriteWeb (RWW), a popular and widely respected technology blog. Recently, RWW launched its new Enterprise Channel. While this channel is not purely about rich Internet applications (RIAs), its broad Enterprise 2.0 focus will no doubt touch on them. In fact in the channel’s first post, RWW does a great job of presenting the perfect storm that’s hitting enterprises and causing the push toward RIA-driven interfaces.

The second noteworthy item comes in the form of a comment made by Rebecca Wettemann, an analyst with Nucleus Research, in a Wall Street Journal article. While not directly implying that RIAs are a coming trend, she certainly lays down the path with this statement:

There used to be a time when IT departments could get away with forcing employees to use complicated and hard-to-use software. The average worker didn’t know that better alternatives were out there. But as workers gain experience with consumer-focused software – either in their personal lives or at the office – they’re starting to realize that software can be easy-to-use and quick to get started on.

It will only be a matter of time before we see more movement in this direction.

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