Piwik‘s mission statement is

“to create, as a community, the leading international open source web analytics application, providing access to all functionality through open components and open APIs”.

And the developer team has come very close to the first main milestone with regards to this mission: The recently released version 0.9.9 is the last maintenance release before the final 1.0 and might remain unchanged if no major issues are identified.

Piwik is the open source alternative to Google Analytics and has the following additional benefits:

• Open Source (understand and change as you require)
• Plug-In architecture (modular extension)
• Mobile Client (now including iPod)
• ON-Premise (installed on YOUR server, data on YOUR server)
• Open API for data exports (supporting xml, json, php or csv)

Publishers who distribute content, media and applications on the web want to understand how, where and by whom their assets are being consumed. This is a question very often answered by Google Analytics, a tool based on JavaScript and Cockies to track user behavior on the web that comes bundled with a nice analytics service and reporting engine to draw conclusions out of the collected data. Some people argue that the analytics are not all actionable or do not lead to any actions, but Google is the most popular today – by far.

With the mobile web finally becoming a reality thanks to the iPhone, the distribution channels of digital assets to consumers today include not only mobile sites but more and more also mobile applications and especially iPhone applications. For the consumer the difference between the two is small and sometimes even not noticed, but for distributors of content moving to iPhone applications is quite a change when it comes to analytics. For websites optimized to show on the iPhones web browser one can rely on the same tracking and analytics functionality from Google. But iPhone applications are not supported.

Quite early in time, Pinch Media started providing an analytics library and service very similar to Google Analytics that can be used for user tracking in iPhone applications.

Pinch Analytics is software that collects anonymous usage data from mobile phone applications, and presents it in aggregated form. <..> Using Pinch Analytics will provide you with information about how your application is being used, which you can then use to improve and enhance it.

So Pinch Media is really a Google Analytics for the iPhone and they also track the same type of data. But also since the revelation of the Palm Pre collecting user data and constantly updating the vendor about them, the community seems to see this differently. The current conversation considers tracking user behavior in iPhone apps spying on them and using their bandwidth for the tracked data stealing from them. Two of the differences are an assumed less anonymous character of a device id of the iPhone over an IP address and the higher accuracy of a geo location based on real latitude and longitude and not just the location of your provider IP location.

The German newspaper Die Zeit also considers Pinch Media spyware and suggests a firewall for the iPhone. At least the blocking part of such a firewall is now available to users of cracked iPhones through Jay Freeman’s privaCy tool.

Pinch Media have in the mean time reacted and now also offer a version of their tool with an extended option for users to opt-out of the user tracking. And this requires the developers to update the existing iPhone apps.

I am sure a lot of developers will update their apps and carefully consider whether to use analytics libraries or not in the future. The is in line with the typical patterns of the consumerized mobile and web business and this is good. But I do not like the term spyware. Wikipedia says about Spyware:

Spyware is known to change computer settings, resulting in slow connection speeds, different home pages, and/or loss of Internet or functionality of other programs.

Pinch media is able to derive relevant conclusions out of their intelligence that do not harm the user but help the developer of the application.

An approach I really like is the one of Twitterfon. They have a free and a commercial version of their app and for the free one they expect their users to agree to sharing some of their data. Get something for free but give something back that does not cost you anything that can be valuable for the vendor.

What do you think?

From the Google Wave Developer Blog:

To kickoff Federation Day, we open sourced two components: 1) the Operational Transform (OT) code and the underlying wave model, and 2) a basic client/server prototype that uses the wave protocol. The OT code is the heart and soul of the collaborative experience in Google Wave and we plan that code will evolve into the production-quality reference implementation.
The prototype is intended primarily as a simple “hello, world” implementation, to encourage experimentation using the Google Wave Federation Protocol. All of this code — nearly 40,000 lines of Java code — is available under the Apache 2.0 license, and we’ll be open sourcing more code as wave evolves. Check out the source code and get started with the introductory documentation.

Through their labs Adobe has launched a new service called Adobe Wave.

Adobe Wave is a client application (based on Air) that will keep you informed about updates to subscribed services. The subscriptions are handled by a service by Adobe.

With Adobe Wave, get all of your notifications through a single application. You don’t have to worry about downloading a separate notification application for each website.

Why can’t they find their own name? And how can they think this will not confuse the consumer? And why would they believe this confusion won’t be of a disadvantage for Adobe?

Check out the new offering here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/wave/

I’ve been trying dozens of online storage and backup services in the last couple of years. I also have some experience with (Enterprise) Content and Document Management and have an understanding of the benefits and challenges with cloud based and SaaS services.

So here comes dropbox. Dropbox are quite successful in revolutionizing the way people (including myself) think about and access their files. In particular, they make it easy to securely share files with other people, sync them across multiple computers, access them from anywhere, and keep them. Safe.

I’m currently involved in three different projects with distributed teams and with no Alfresco or the like at hand, dropbox was the answer to all document based collaboration. And the feedback from the teams is: a very satisfactory one.

Dropbox has an online web client for document management including

• online storage and retrieval
• sharing
• versioning
• special support for pictures
• update notification (incl. RSS)
• account information and settings and
• installation support for OS specific clients

They provide clients for Windows, Mac and Linux and the web client has a special iPhone output version. I just love the Growl integration. Check the screencast for a detailed introduction and to see what I mean here.

Dropbox is a tech startup based in San Francisco. They are funded by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners and since launching end of last year they have attracted over a million users.

Get Dropbox here.

I remember writing email to only to three other students in the CS lab and to the one other admin that I worked with as a student. It was not really reliable, because you had no idea when and if at all the person would actually get the message (“Did you get my email about…”) and there were hardly any people that would have an email address (that they knew of or had proper access to). The other cool thing at the time where SMS text messages. My first mobile phone subscription in Germany came with unlimited free SMS – no one thought that the service would be relevant or actually be able to generate substantial revenues and it came at almost no additional cost for the operators.

In the mean time the almost 40 year old email and 25 year old SMS have become the most widely used data applications world wide (read a great article on SMS and its user base and reach here).

Only in recent years we see the continuously increasing messaging traffic growing in other channels like instant messaging and online chats, collaboration platforms including wikis and forums, blogging and micro blogging and the cross syndication of those – even in larger corporations and enterprises (tell companies how to use Twitter at http://256.dk and get access to the data here at http://aleqz.com).

But each channel has more or less their own primary purpose and the very synchronous (IM, chat, etc) and very asynchronous (email, forums, wikis etc) ways of exchanging messages do not mix very well with the standard messaging clients today. As much as I always believed, that it was important to determine the most effective delivery mode since it directly impacts the level of interaction, micro blogging services like Twitter seem to prove me wrong or at least render the question irrelevant, as they seem to be able to address both – depending on how you use the service (and set up your client).

And even more “both” is in Google Wave. Google Wave is a soon to be open sourced framework for distributed messaging and collaboration platforms. It perfectly combines asynchronous email type messaging with instant messaging capabilities (both look extremely usable) and adds collaboration as content is not categorized as message, stream or document before selecting the sharing and editing metaphor.
The user experience is equally compelling like with Google Maps – no surprise with the two Rasmussen brothers on board of the Australian team. Drag and drop from the desktop, context sensitive action menus inside the content and concurrent live editing by multiple users are just a few highlights of what was shown at Google I/O.
Other features include wave history and playback of changes, Android and iPhone mobile browser support, versioning and version control, extensible content model to support more than just rich text content, embed API (as in maps: APIs make it happen) and plugin architecture. The chess game plugin definitely benefits from the history/playback feature but the spell checker, the link checker and the real time translation are genius tools already by them selves. Doodle will not like the Yes/No/Maybe plugin too much I assume.

Google Wave has only be announced an a small group of users is currently testing an early version. But if Google gets is half as right as they did with Maps, Google Waves is going to become the platform for most of the communication that is today distributed over hundreds of networks, platforms and technologies. What Facebook provided as the combination of micro blogging, picture gallery and exchange and address book is going to be available from a Google supported open source community with additional features and integrations. And this combination and the fact that Google is opening it up AND giving it into the hands of the community might be the right foundation for a new standard way of communication.

Curious to see how the mobile and address book service for non internet devices is going to be addressed.

The product: wave.google.com
The platform: code.google.com/apis/wave
The protocol: www.waveprotocol.org

Content management interoperability services (CMIS) enables easy information sharing across Drupal and Alfresco platforms.

Today we announced the integration of CMIS into the Drupal open source CMS. We partnered with Acquia, commercial support provider for Drupal, the open source social publishing software, and Alfresco, the open source alternative for enterprise content management, to integrate Alfresco with Drupal using CMIS.

Proposed as a new standard for content management by industry-leading organizations including IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and Alfresco, CMIS allows for interoperability between multiple sites and content repositories.

“The cool thing about CMIS is that it unlocks the content scattered across multiple silos in an organization.” says Jeff Potts, Optaros content management practice director. “Our clients get to choose the front-end technology with the best fit, and then they use CMIS as a consistent approach to working with the content.”

“Once content is in a CMIS-compliant repository like Alfresco, it can be synchronized or accessed from any number of Drupal sites via the CMIS API, without specialized integration,” says Dries Buytaert, Drupal founder and Acquia co-founder and CTO.

Led by Optaros’ systems integration team, developers from each company worked together to plan the CMIS integration with Drupal’s open source CMS. A collaborative project was housed online through OForge, an Optaros-created shared workspace, where developers could keep each other informed of project status, track code and work out bugs as the project progressed.

“Optaros’ solution utilizes the best capabilities of both Alfresco and Drupal, it shows what is possible when open source vendors and solution providers collaborate to create better solutions for customers. Open standards like CMIS will make similar solutions easier to accomplish,” says John Newton, Alfresco Software CTO and co-founder.

Drupal community members can access code through the Drupal CMIS API and CMIS Alfresco modules on Drupal.org.

Nuxeo, open source software vendor, creator of the popular Enterprise Content Management software suite Nuxeo Galaxy, announces the completion of a € 2 million Series A round of financing led by OTC Asset Management.
In addition Nuxeo is strengthening its management and corporate governance: Eric Barroca takes over chief executive officer and Stefane Fermigier, founder of the company, joins the supervisory board as chairman.

http://www.nuxeo.com/en/news/nuxeo-secures-2-million/

My colleague Jeff Potts, Director of our ECM Practice at Optaros, has been working on a developer guide for Alfresco for quite some time. End of October he announced the publication of his book.

This book is a great tutorial for getting started with Alfresco. Here is what the publisher Packt says:

Alfresco is an open source platform for Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions. ECM includes things like Document Management, Web Content Management, Collaboration/Enterprise 2.0, Digital Asset Management, Records Management, and Imaging. At its core is a repository for rich content like documents, web assets, XML, and multimedia. The repository is surrounded by a services layer (supporting both SOAP and REST) that makes getting content into and out of the repository a breeze, which is why so many next generation Internet solutions are built on Alfresco.
Implementing Alfresco usually involves extending the repository to accommodate your business-specific metadata and business logic. These extensions are done using some combination of Java, JavaScript, XML, and FreeMarker.
This book takes you through a set of exercises as if you were rolling out and customizing the platform for a fictional organization called SomeCo, which wants to roll out Alfresco enterprise-wide. Each department has a set of requirements that need addressed. We will show you how to extend Alfresco to meet these requirements. By the time you’ve worked through the entire book, you will be familiar with the entire platform. You’ll be prepared to make your own customizations whether they are part of a Document Management solution, a web site that uses Alfresco for content storage, or an entire custom application built on Alfresco’s REST API.
This book will give you the knowledge and confidence you need to make Alfresco do what you need it to do.

Jeff’s blog post | Packt website | Review by CMS Report | Optaros website on the release

[Update] Missing in the first issue: Acknowledgements.

Numiton who “bring open source PHP to Java” have announced WordPress in Java.

The so called nWordpress is based on the version 2.5.1 of the popular PHP blogging tool. It is available under GPL like WordPress and leverages a Spring-MVC-Framework.

Other PHP applications numiton plan to port include Joomla, Drupal as well as Mediawiki, Mantis and DocuWiki. They have a specific porting tool nTile PtoJ, which they claim can convert PHP code to Java EE.

As a justification for the effort, numiton claim that PHP solutions often suffer from sub-optimal code quality, coupled with insufficient tools/IDE support, that makes you wonder how difficult it is to maintain and develop such projects.

They believe, that by porting the to Java EE through an automated process, they will gain easier maintenance and development and be able to establish superior architectures and finally superior tools.

WordPress have introduced an Open Source app that lets you write posts, upload photos, and edit your WordPress blog from your iPhone or iPod Touch. With support for both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress (2.5.1 or higher), users can now write and manage their blog on the go.

Download from the iTunes AppStore.

The interesting bit is the solution to prevent data loss when receiving a call. WordPress for iPhone will recover your post after ending the call. You can take pictures on the phone and blog them instantly, iPod touch users are limited to pictures from the photo library.
See pictures of the app in action in the gallery.

There is a dedicated WordPress on the iPhone blog with more info and this video:

Optaros has written a streamlined web client for Alfresco based entirely on REST (web scripts) and ExtJS. It is called DoCASU, which stands for Document Access for Casual Users, and we’re making it freely-available as an open source project on code.optaros.com.

DoCASU 1.0 leverages the understanding gained from corporate user requirements and utilizes Rich Internet Application technologies such as the ExtJS AJAX framework. DoCASU is not intended to replace the already existing Alfresco web user interface, but rather offer an alternative for users who require a limited set of features for them to profit from simplicity and ease of use. Already today thousands of users at NXP, a top 10 semiconductor company founded by Philips, are enjoying the user friendly front end solution.

DoCASU is a showcase of what can be done on top of Alfresco’s Web Script approach with state of the art RIA technologies. Developers can take DoCASU as a start for even more comprehensive (or simplistic) user interfaces, purpose built front ends or just as the base for learning on how to build Alfresco user interfaces and applications leveraging Web Scripts.

It requires Alfresco 2.1.1 or later. The future DoCASU releases will include a drop zone for dragging and dropping files also for desktop interaction, tabbed navigation, configurable skins, usability improvements and more.

Read about the project and download the AMP from code.optaros.com. If you see things that need fixing, create a bug report or fix it yourself and let us know.