When you work on a medium or large company, one of the most common problems you have to face is how to develop, deploy and most importantly run and maintain your business applications, so that everything runs smoothly and without a hitch.

When you are working in a new company, or the company is just starting to build its suite of business applications, it is the ideal moment to design and develop them based on flexible and lasting standards so that you can “easily” achieve your ultimate goal: to have a working, lean set of applications working in concert to support the company’s processes.

And that’s when Business Process Management architectures like SOA and BPEL come into play, to provide you with a rich, flexible and scalable set of tools that you can harness to make your applications “talk” efficiently to each other, even if you didn’t know that they would have to exchange information or work together as part of a process.

When developing applications under these standards, everything is deployed as a service and you need a SOA Software stack that will allow you to expose, connect and wire these services together to create new processes which in turn, can be wired with other services (applications) to create new, more complex applications without touching a single line of code of the original applications.

This sounds great and all but the single biggest threat to all this process orchestration is not having a powerful SOA/BPEL stack such as Active Endpoints’ Active VOS to support and control the processes  that you design.

While there are some SOA stacks from big names like Oracle and SAP they lack the ease that aVOS’ graphical process “wiring” offers not to mention that these offers carry a hefty price tag, and they require SOA experts that charge you way too much.

If you would like to know more about SOA, BPEL and what they can do for your company applications and processes, you can visit the ActiveVos Blog, where you’ll find a lot of valuable information as well as in-depth analysis of their uses and common development strategies.

Thanksgiving will be here before we know it, which signals one thing: Official Holiday Shopping Season. Which, for many small business owners, means it’s time to hire some extra help now. If you’re planning on hiring temporary help for the holiday rush, today’s Tools and Tips article offers some tips on how to build a great staff:

• Start looking now: Starting the process sooner will not only give you plenty of time to fill your hiring needs, but it also will give you a chance to snag the better employees before your competitors hire them.


• Hire as if it were permanent: Your new hire might be there for only a few weeks, but your company will be around long after the worker leaves. You don’t want a temp’s sloppy work to cause problems after he or she is gone.


• Look for jolly workers: It is the season of good will, so you want both your permanent and temporary staff to reflect that.


• Train creatively: Make cheat sheets or index cards that temporary staff can use not only to learn about your business quickly, but also to answer customer questions.


• Keep everyone happy: You’ve gone to the trouble to hire top-notch seasonal help. Now make sure the workers stay and do their best.

As I said in my previous posts (obviously generated by the need to buy a nice diamond anniversary ring for my wife Patricia), diamonds give its wearer style and distinction.

You have found that special person to share the rest of your life with and now you need to find the perfect wedding rings that will last a lifetime . Buying a wedding ring in BlueNile.com can be a widely varied shopping experience. Blue Nile offers exceptional quality on all wedding bands, offering the highest quality diamonds and only the finest grades of platinum and gold.

Buying a wedding ring can be one of the most important purchases in your life, both because of the implied importance of the event/person and the amount of investment you’re putting into it. The rings you slide on each other’s fingers on your wedding day will be a lasting reminder of its promise and joy.Choose a ring you’ll cherish for the rest of your life.

They also offers the lowest diamond prices in the industry, 20 to 40% below traditional retail. Blue Nile makes it easy to design your own ring. Follow their simple, point-and-click process that you can browse on their website to find the perfect diamond and setting.

And if you need insurance about their reputation, Blue Nile is a publicly traded company listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange, and has been profiled by Forbes and The New York Times. All orders ship via free FedEx and each order is backed by a 30-day no questions asked return policy.

On Techmeme – Saw this article on CNet, re Tim O’Reilly’s talk at Web Expo New York:

“(These are) pretty depressing times in a lot of ways,” O’Reilly said in an address that first had looked like it would simply be a starry-eyed discussion of enterprise opportunities for Web 2.0. “And you have to conclude, if you look at the focus of a lot of what you call ‘Web 2.0,’ the relentless focus on advertising-based consumer models, lightweight applications, we may be living in somewhat of a bubble, and I’m not talking about an investment bubble. (It’s) a reality bubble.”

There is a limit to Ad funding for Web 2.0 businesses. Allow me a little fag-packet analysis here. The total global Ad industry is c $0.5 trillion, the online biz globally is about 10% of that at most, and the 80/20 of that goes to Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and AOL. That leaves about $10bn for everybody else, and much of that (say 80/20 again) is being hoovered up by existing high quality and/or high volume existing web assets, leaving in the order of $2bn for everyone else. Assuming every Web 2.0 startup wants to be worth at least $100m, and assuming that is on a 10x multiple of revenues, that means every successful company is running at $10m ad revenues pa. Thus, $2bn / $10m = c 200 startups can live on Ad funding globally on average. Even if I’m 10x out, so its 2,000, you can see that 100% Ad supported business models are not a majority play. And Advertising overall is likely to be in the decline for a few cycles now.

Tim also pointed out another issue, that of allocation of resources in the current market:

“And what are the best and the brightest working on?” O’Reilly asked, displaying a slide of the popular Facebook application SuperPoke, which invites you to, among other things, “throw sheep” at your friends.

“Do you see a problem here?” he posed, showing another slide of the popular iPhone app “iBeer,” which simulates chugging a pint. “You have to ask yourself, are we working on the right things?”

What O’Reilly is talking about here is a typical example of what happens if everything is free – in those sort of markets, there is no way to extract extra value from delivering quality, so cheap-to-produce cr*p drives it out.

( At the O’Reilly Web Expo in Berlin I’ll be talking about this and other Limits to FreeConomics – which after this week I suspect have become a lot closer to home )

In Chapter 9 of ‘Managing the Crowd’ I make the point that “Largely as a result of … technical advances, we now live in a world defined by information storage; ours is now a culture in which size most definitely matters. Just take each new generation of iPod that hits our shops. Have you ever seen an improved ability to decide what tracks you want to delete quoted as a selling point? No. The fact that it now has a 16Gb memory, compared with the 8Gb available last year, or the 4Gb the previous year, however, most definitely is”.

In this context it was interesting to read over the weekend that iPod will no longer be selling their 160GB iPod Classic. As the Daily Telegraph puts it, “ (perhaps) people have realised that, although the iPod has the potential to put their entire CD library in their pocket, they only ever listen to a few hundred favourite songs”. So maybe there are limits to our love affair with storage after all.

More interesting still, particularly in relation to Records Mgt 2.0, is the new ‘music-recommendation engine’ which the new Nano has built into it. According to the article by Claudine Beaumont “Genius will scan through your music collection looking at genres, the number of albums and songs you have by a particular artist, as well as the ratings you have given them. It will also look at the characteristics of the song itself, such as beats per minute… (it then) beams it back to the iTunes mothership. From there, it is able to build dynamic playlists of other recommended tracks, based not only on your library, but that of other iTunes users with similar tastes”.

So here we have the appraisal of large volumes of content based on information value and decided by a combination of both user opinion and user behaviour. Plus a system which combines the views and actions of the individual with those of the broader user community to provide a more informed analysis based on the ‘wisdom of the crowd’. Well whad’ya know. If we were talking about online business records, rather than music records, I’d say that Apple have just taken a pretty big stride towards realising Records Management 2.0.