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)

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.

On Thursday SourceForge announced the acquisition of Ohloh!, an open source code and community directory that I have been following myself while Optaros were establishing and growing the enterprise open source directory eosdirectory.com.

While the Eosdirectory is a collection of what Optaros believes to be enterprise ready solutions that then get rated by Optaros and also independently by the community, ohloh! has a more automated approach to rating, that uses a metric that is focused not on what visitors say about a project but what active contributors actually do to the code. Ohloh! analyses the programming languages involved, can indicate the size of a community, when it has been established, how active it is also over time (e.g. Firefox has a “Decreasing year-over-year development activity”), and this provides useful hard data in addition to the qualitative commentary and discussions. Through the community platform you can identify and get in touch with individuals behind the projects with a reference to their other activities and thus a broader context.

As such and with it consistent and wide reach over more then 3´500 open source projects it is a great addition to the SourceForge portfolio supporting a business model that is primarily based on advertising.

“We expect the acquisition of Ohloh and the integration of its technology to significantly improve our insights about the open source development community and our ability to target advertising,” said Jon Sobel, SourceForge’s group president of Media.

This is a great success story. I hope that the acquisition will help SourceForge and the existing ohloh! community, as currently the two platforms are mostly complimentary.
Congratulations to the ohloh! team for a great effort since 2004 and to SourceForge for what I consider a good but also bold move.

The Eosdirectory is also an important place to watch. Check out the recent request for improvement suggestions for a soon to come re-launch of the platform.

After opening the API for the news feed recently, Facebook announced end of April that they were working on OpenID support for signle-sign-on. Not even four weeks later you can select Google, MySpace, Yahoo, Vidoop, Myopenid and OpenID as linked account options.

You can also connect with these logins later. If you do that e.g. for Gmail, you will be able to access Facebook with out login when coming from your Gmail account.

This is truly what I call a bold step. Most other larger platforms will allow you to use their credentials in an openid way for other sites, but Facebook are the only ones to allow 3rd party credentials and thus spare you the local registration.

This is a big move towards openness but also a big step towards each other between Facebook and Google. Quite surprising to me, given that Google was supposed to work on their own social network and had recently announced friend connect. Maybe finally Google starts to realize that Facebook will be difficult to overrun – even for a Google.

Update:
I also noticed that the Gmail account linking will ask for permission to share the Gmail contacts. Not sure how this impacts friend finder features and to what extend they get automated, but it is truly the more interesting effect “Addressbook control” of the new feature for Facebook and Google compared to the convenience of a single-sign-on.

The Best of Swiss Web Awards are the most coveted awards for e-business, Internet and mobile projects in Switzerland since 2001. A total of 277 projects were submitted to the jury this year in eight categories. A panel of 80 experts has revealed this year’s winners of the Best of Swiss Web Awards and one of our projects we successfully delivered in 2008, me2me, was awarded twice with this accolade which honours Switzerland’s top websites.

Congratulations go to our partners Liip AG for winning the Master of Swiss Web with their iPhone Application. Gottago is an amazing application and was for long the most popular free app in Switzerland. With open sourcing the project to Transport, Marc took a bold move that deserves every recognition.

The special topic of this year’s award was “Women wired in Web” and I had the pleasure to share a table with Maya and Terry from byteKultur, a women only web and design agency focussing on Joomla based website implementations. Interestingly enough the jury did not find the fact that a bunch of girls with no support from any boys run their own business relying on an open source project and the community worth mentioning. Instead they awarded a larger campaign project that was leveraging a female celebrity and recognized a bunch of submissions with female supporting roles. Hm. If you ever need a small but good piece of design or look for some Joomla experts, got check out byteKultur.net.

me2me was awarded the Best of Swiss Web Technology Innovation Silver Award and the Business Efficiency Bronze Award 2009.

The project was also a nominee for the 2009 Master of Swiss Web.

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.

Our customer, me2me AG, supplier of Web and voice services, announced today the creation of me2me, a mobile information storage and retrieval service.

Conceived by me2me AG and assembled by Optaros, me2me mobile applications are available for large-scale trials with network operators in Europe and the United States.

Optaros’ open source consulting team provided me2me with a solid infrastructure, allowing users to interact with me2me in following ways:

• Use a single number to verbally store daily life information and tag it with personal terms to make it searchable
• Retrieve information over the phone or with a Web account
• Have information delivered by text message instantly
• Take control over their voice messages: edit, tag and organize their in- and outbox

“We help clients like me2me deliver solutions that are Assembled Web-native, flowing seamlessly between web, mobile and offline,” says Philippe Grosjean, managing director for Europe, Optaros. “Leading companies know that mobile applications are integral in creating quality customer relationships.”

“Optaros managed to quickly turn our ideas into working mobile applications, thanks to their unique approach to open source consulting and assembly,” says Christian Giroux, me2me CMO. “Feedback from testing a beta-version of the service is overwhelmingly positive. We truly see me2me as the next big thing in mobile.”

me2me AG is a mobile communications company offering unique next generation convergent web and voice services. The flagship solution “me2me” offers operators the opportunity to generate new revenue streams and gives users an intelligent daily life information service enabling rapid storage, management and retrieval of information, in order to simplify and help organise their busy lives. Founded in early 2008 and financed by Swisscom Ventures, me2me AG is headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland with subsidiaries in London,UK and Boston, US.

I’ve been writing in this blog about what I call the two economy, literally bringing together what I believe was good and true and valuable for enterprises about the so called new economy from beginning of the century (dot com) and the current conversations about everything 2.0 up to the crisis 2.0 just recently but also beyond. I’ve also been referring to the current phase as the time of the Assembled Web.

As with the client server era in the 1990, and the e-business times around 2000, we have seen a major shift connected to the recent development around the way enterprises require and rightly demand solutions to leverage consumer engagement to support their business (web 2.0) and the recent economical changes. Our customers consume services and solutions from vendors differently and thus the landscape and the rules are changing significantly.

Most IT solution provider’s business models foster a lock in through licenses and proprietary technology. The so called enterprise platform or suite is the perfect tool for that. Some of them seem omnipotent if you listen to marketeers, but most struggle to provide a real long term business value across the boundaries of typical solution areas. Our clients are looking for business agility (time to market) and vendor independence and a rich user experience for their customers. At the same time they have left the scope of a single platform and are assembling their web solutions rapidly from proven and often open components to a landscape of channels and services available to their customers in unlimited ways and combinations. Some of which reside inside their firewalls, but lots of which are parts of the cloud.

Read Marc Osofsky’s post on the Assembled Web at the Optaros website for a detailed comparison to the Siloed Web.

The Assembled Web is the full picture to pull business models, decentralized operations, customer self-service and communities, direct consumer engagement and shared product development. At Optaros we help you expand your brand presence to engage with customers across the internet and assembling more agile IT systems to make this easy to execute.

Assembled Web has been a category for my post on this blog for a while and expect more in the coming weeks on this topic also for specific verticals.

Mountain View-based start-up Appcelerator has raised $4.1 million in a Series A round led by Storm Ventures. The money will go primarily towards the development of an open source competitor to Adobe AIR, which enables web developers to create applications that look and function more like desktop programs.

Titanium is the first open platform for building rich desktop applications:

• Open source: Titanium is licensed under the Apache Public License (version 2)
• Open web: Use standard HTML, CSS and Javascript to build rich desktop apps
• Open desktop: Run your apps on Windows, Mac and Linux (coming soon!)
• Open API: Add rich desktop capabilities to your apps using a simple Javascript API

See some Titanium-powered demos here.

I had the pleasure on Monday to contribute to the Swiss MobileMonday by speaking about iPhone development, what makes the experience so special and how you can learn from Apple’s concepts for other mobile initiatives by applying Open Source concepts to assemble solutions.

The event was sponsored by Swisscom and introduced by the chairman Walter Steinlin, Head of Swisscom Outlook, former CTO and Head of Swisscom Innovations.

Claude Florin did a great job in facilitating the panel with the speakers Tim Haysom (CMO of OMTP) who talked about the BONDI initiative, Martin Gafner and Andreas Zuber from Puzzle ITC with a great introduction to the neo freerunner with OpenMoko, Reto Senn (COO and Co-Founder of Bitforge) and Nicolai Finke Product Manager with Esmertec.

It was interesting to see how it was really a 1.0 (fragmented mobile handset world) vs. 1.5 (clean end-to-end experience with the iPhone) discussion. The group agreed, that 1.0 is broken to a certain extent, but it was also clear that the iPhone and it’s eco system are by far not perfect and therefor more 1.5 than 2.0.

See all the speakers and presentations at the MobileMonday website.

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.