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You can add any wikipedia entry combined with a “2.0″ or “3.0″ and you will probably find something or someone on the web claiming to have found a new evolution of it by looking at standard evloution criteria or the typical aspects of web 2.0. As this becomes arbitrarily boring it take quite a lot to draw my attention by a simple “2.0″ or “beta” (not to mention “gamma”) but this is a different story:

Yahoo! and OMD did a survey on Traditional Values Among Today’s Tech-Savvy Families

Family 2.0

A dramatic shift in family demographics and dynamics underlies the key findings of the Yahoo!/OMD research. With only a third of U.S. online households (33 percent) today consisting of the once-typical husband, wife, and children, the Ozzie and Harriet era is long past. The family power structure is changing as younger men are far more likely to cook, clean, and plan family activities, while women are as likely as men to manage family finances. As a more open, democratic family emerges, roles and levels of influence change.

“Family 2.0 isn’t the Cleavers of the 1950s or the futuristic Jetsons. Today’s men cook, women work, and kids often are very tech-savvy,” said Michele Madansky, vice president of sales research, Yahoo!. “Father doesn’t always know best. He may not have a clue about what MP3 player is the best value, but daughter can be the expert because she has spent time online comparison shopping prices and features.”

Interesting but maybe not very surprising (for the average US houshold, which also voted for the current administration):

In the U.S., respondents listed, on average, a total of more than 43 hours of daily activities, including time spent sleeping, working, commuting, as well as technology/media-based activities such as emailing, using an MP3 player, text messaging, and watching TV.

I would be interested in those numbers for “non average US houshold” or Europe or even Switzerland. But I guess the bottom line is that we still spend more than 24 hours per day doing these things…

IBM announced the release of their latest CMS now leveraging SOA and supporting JSR-170 as leading industry standard facilitating exchange among CMS packages.

The new solution delivers easy-to-use authoring tools, making it simple for non-technical users to create and publish customized, up-to-the minute Web content. New ease-of-use features include menu-based personalization tools that allow users to customize forms based on a role or function. Additionally, a choice of rich text editors and wiki-like editing features help users edit objects and data on-the-fly within the context of a Web site or portal.

• Openness and flexibility to interact with other content authoring packages: Web content is now stored in the Java Content Repository (JCR) which is a strong step toward full support of the JSR 170. As the leading industry standard, JSR 170 facilitates information exchange among a variety of web content management software packages.
• …

As part of an organization’s Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), Workplace Web Content Management 6.0 plays a vital role in helping businesses create and edit content that can then be easily shared with customers, partners and suppliers.

I guess the aproach is almost right. Problem is that this will all happen at 39′999 USD per typical CPU - no mention of included support, so not realy a threat for our many OS alternatives. Here I just learned that 10.000 USD per CPU and year for a supported enterprise version seems to be the current number at which you can survive giving away your community edition for free.

Optaros today announced the development of Swisscom Mobile Labs, an innovative web platform and testing environment for Swisscom Mobile that all internet users can access. The environment allows the leading Swiss telecommunications company to propose and introduce new products and services at an early stage to interested people. Swisscom Mobile Labs enables users to download and use products and services and to comment on, evaluate and rate proposed services. By facilitating a discussion and ongoing communication with users, Swisscom Mobile can present new services early to improve and optimize them based on user feedback or to adapt or change them completely if needed.

Swisscom Mobile Labs is one of the first known Web 2.0 oriented offerings in Switzerland and illustrates a new approach on how services can be developed, tested and proliferated iteratively while leveraging customer input and feedback. This approach is commonly referred to by Web 2.0 experts as ‘perpetual beta’.

Optaros developed the entire web platform in approximately four weeks and used modern technologies such as Ajax, Alfresco’s repository content, as well as many other open source frameworks and components.

‘We are excited about the quality of the application and the speed in which the platform has been developed and put into production. Very seldom do we receive such innovative and mature solutions for acceptance’, said Stefan Mauron, Head of Strategic Initiatives at Swisscom Mobile.

Besides having developed the solution following Optaros’ Assembly methodology, Optaros also handles the operation and maintenance of the platform.

‘The web platform Swisscom Mobile Labs clearly shows the way that many enterprises will go in the future’, said Bruno von Rotz, Vice President and Country Manager for Optaros in Switzerland. ‘Labs such as the one we implemented for Swisscom Mobile help to adjust and optimize products, communication offerings and services to the needs of the customer. We are happy that Swisscom Mobile leverages our open source and next generation internet expertise in such an innovative endeavor.’

Swisscom Mobile is with a market share of 64% and 69% customer growth in 2005 the number one in the Swiss mobile communication industry. In 2005 Swisscom Mobile achieved revenues of CHF 4’168 billion and serves more than 4.3 million mobile phone customers. Swisscom Mobile is owned by Swisscom AG (75%) and the british Vodafone Group (25%). The company operates GSM networks (900/1800 MHz) covering all Switzerland. The network was extended in 2005 with EDGE. With HDSPA Swisscom Mobile has taken a new turbo network in production in February 2006. It is five times faster than UMTS and can reach about the speed of ADSL. Further Swisscom Mobile reached a UMTS coverage of almost 90% in Switzerland and offers approximately 1’000 Hotspots for wireless access to the Internet.

Seth’s slide on standards in CMS in his Washington Gilbane deck named this post. I came accross it while re-organizing and -designing my website. I’m leveraging some later WordPress features and a new template.
I have noticed a increasing number of regular visitors on my blog, but still no comments via blog. I get all the feedback by mail. Maybe this new design will change this a little. Feel free to comment. :)

I had the chance to see a preview of the WCM capabilities of Alfresco ECM last week in the UK. Kevin Cochrane had a hard time circumnavigating the issues the version still had, but I was impressed with the progress his team has made in the last couple of weeks. Alfresco has a client already that will use Alfresco as their WCM solution and I guess with a public preview available of the 1.5 more will cue up to be next. In fact I assume that a similar rush demand as we have seen with the DMS features will occur soon.
The current version 1.3 and the announced (preview) version 1.4 are great steps for Alfresco towards becoming a true ECM product. The 1.5 including Web Content Management and the 2.0 will make this claim true.

Added features in version 1.4

• Business Process and Lifecycle Management
• Full Auditing
• Records Management
• Image Capture Integration

To be expected features in version 1.5

• XForms
• Web Content Management

Alfresco is truly on the right way.

Atlas is Microsoft’s answer to Ajax frameworks.

“Atlas” is a free framework for building a new generation of richer, more interactive, highly personalized cross-browser web applications.
This new web development technology from Microsoft integrates cross-browser client script libraries with the ASP.NET 2.0 server-based development framework. In addition, “Atlas” offers you the same type of development platform for client-based web pages that ASP.NET offers for server-based pages. And because “Atlas” is an extension of ASP.NET, it is fully integrated with server-based services. “Atlas” makes it possible to easily take advantage of AJAX techniques on the web and enables you to create ASP.NET pages with a rich, responsive UI and server communication. However, “Atlas” isn’t just for ASP.NET. You can take advantage of the rich client framework to easily build client-centric web applications that integrate with any backend data provider and run on most modern browsers.

It is not Open Source but it is quite Web 2.0 and as a matter of fact one of my popular Web 2.0 examples Pageflakes is built using Atlas.
See some details here.

The blogging software and platform company Six Apart has announced to have acquired the feed reader company Rojo, who run Rojo and Nooz.

Not only are we excited to be affiliated with Rojo and Nooz, we are thrilled about the people and technologies that join Six Apart through this acquisition. Four people will become core members of the Six Apart Team: Chris Alden, Aaron Emigh, Andrew Bunner and Jim Ramsey.
…
And what does this mean for Six Apart? It means that Six Apart is continuing its aggressive strategy to remain the leader in blogging software and services through continued innovation, acquisitions and partnerships.

Focus Ventures and Intel Capital injected some 12 million $ last March into Six Apart who claim to have 15 million users.

John Newton wrote a good article on the future of content management and a presentation he held at Oxford. In line with web 2.0, web 3.0, enterprise 2.0, world 2.0, security 2.0, virtualization 2.0 etc. he calls it content management 2.0.

These new technologies provide greater interactivity through AJAX, new collaborative styles of classification and tagging, and user driven configuration are being led more by open source than the traditional engines of enterprise content management expansion.

…

The presentation explained the challenges that existing enterprise content management has in addressing Web 2.0, what needs are not currently being met for end users, what technology changes are required, and how do these technologies “mash-up” to be able to glue systems together through web services and other web-oriented protocols. It also discussed the role that open source will play in this next generation of enterprise content management.

I’m curious to hear from John next week at the Alfresco Partner Meetup in UK how version 1.4 of Alfresco will address all this. You get a taste from his latest post on the Commoditization of ECM. I’ll keep you posted.

I’m holding a presentation on Open Source Document Management at the digicomp OpenTuesday tonight in Zurich.
Click here to register.
There will be an apero afterwards for discussion and networking around Open Source.

[Update]
Thanks to all visitors and the interesting discussions.
My slides are available here.

FON is a WiFi community around the world, open to anyone who wishes to unite and connect to the Internet for free from any corner of the world without cables. It all started as a simple idea: enjoy WiFi technology everywhere across a WiFi Community. Their software converts your router into a FON Social Router. If you do not have a router that is compatible with FON’s software, you can purchase one of their subsidized FON Social Routers.

Foneros are registered users of the FON Community. They can be either Linuses or Bills. Each Fonero’s WiFi router becomes a FON Access Point, and each one of these access points makes up the FON Community. Everyone else who wishes to access the FON Community and who is not a Fonero is an Alien.

Linuses have broadband connections with a FON Social Router at home. Linuses roam all other WiFi Access Points within the FON Community for free. Instead of roaming, Bills are like FON’s travel agents. They receive 50% of the net revenues from those who purchase FON Passes through the Bill’s FON Access Point. Bills also join FON because they like to advertise their products and services in their neighborhoods. FON gives them all the tools to personalize their Access Point and sign-in page.

Aliens using laptop computers or similar devices are permitted to access any FON Access Point by purchasing daily FON passes. The standard rate for these FON passes is currently €/$ 3 for a 24 hour connection period. FON passes are similar to pre-paid cards. Aliens pre-purchase these FON passes and then use them to connect to the Internet freely.