Bruno's Journal


yet another triathlete CTO

Gnome Hack Idea: FreeMind, Tomboy and EDS

I take notes in meetings using FreeMind. Every time I identify a task I mark the node down using an icon and after the meeting I follow up creating the necessary tasks in Evolution. I would like to be able to link my mindmaps to tasks in Evolution. Hopefully it can be done using FreeMind, or perhaps we need to invest in Psycho or something similar tighter to the Gnome desktop. If we decide not to use FreeMind, the tool of choice should use FreeMind’s XML schema to ensure interoperability with folks running other desktops.


Silence

I have been very much silent on my blog for the last 6 weeks. The reason has been me changing jobs to become Yahoo’s Chief Architect of International Engineering. The first weeks at work have been absolutely thrilling and I am highly delighted to be working in such an amazingly skilled and enthusiastic team. I really look forward at the challenge ahead. Unfortunately being able to take on this challenge requires absolute dedication, and my ability to blog will be somehow more limited than in the past. So if you are a usual reader, please bear with me for a little longer: posts will be coming back in no time.


To SaaS or not to SaaS, a Utility-Based Decision

I remain skeptic about any attempts to break out SaaS value/price in a pure TCO, like in this article by Barry Rosenberg and Craig Wright on techweb. If nothing else, simply because of the (human) random nature of choosing between intangibles such as security, mobility, usability, … which are all perceptions.


Increased Transparency Shows Value of YPN

Yahoo!’s new search platform, project Panama, is already showing a win over the last month. A study by comScore shows significant increases in Yahoo’s click through rates, and ad effectiveness when compared to normal links. But to me what is more important, is that Yahoo! is showing due transparency to publishers. Google’s lack of visibility is an abuse to 99% of publishers who have absolutely no idea of what goes on with click-through revenue sharing. And Google it’s not only a black box: it’s an abuse (don’t be evil!??). Yahoo! is certainly hitting Google right where it hurts with YPN.


Open APIs Attract Postini and Avaya to Google Apps

Google Apps is already grabbing corporate attention. It’s not the Google apps’ themselves, but the APIs to allow ISVs and other power software houses can use to write applications that extend or integrate with Google Apps. Whereas security was already a known concern about Google Apps, and Postini is certainly betting on the right horse, Avaya is being innovative and extending its IVR portfolio into the SaaS space. The full article is here.