“Well, the problem is that SOAP is hard.”
It’s early 2007 and I’m dead in the middle of a conversation with a friend at PayPal.
“We were certain that developers accessing the eBay product data would want everything in SOAP and it just made sense to do it that way. It wasn’t right, though. Turns out, SOAP is hard.”
This is neither the first nor the last time I’d find myself submerged in the ‘what-counts-as-too-hard for data access?’ conversation, or the ‘so-who-are-our-users-REALLY?’ conversation that’s never too far behind. Every year sees the addition of yet more developers working in yet more languages inside of even more frameworks than ever before. And the unspoken corollary [...]

Believe it or not, I like Wiki’s definition of Cloud Computing the best. Wiki defines Cloud Computing as a general concept that incorporates Software as a Service (SaaS), Data as a Service (DaaS), Web 2.0 & other recent, well-known technology trends, in which the common theme is reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users.
The best example of Cloud Computing that comes to mind & the ones I use most often are Google’s Mail, Talk, & Doc Applications. Why do I use these applications instead of similar applications already installed on my PC? The answer is simple, these Cloud Computing tools allow me to access my e-mail, message with colleagues, & [...]

As part of my regular morning routine I was reading the latest Penny Arcade webcomic.
It was about Sony and the PSP, in general Sony is always good to take a potshot at. But today’s potshot was based upon lots of ammunition and comes with some weight from the FTC to boot.
The FTC has ruled that companies engaging in Word-of-Mouth marketing that compensates the word-of-mouth participants, that the participants must make the compensation known. This has typically been defined as “shilling”.
Tycho points out the important distinction between Viral Marketing and Guerrilla Marketing. The fact that an ad agency cannot create Viral Marketing is extremely important. Word-Of-Mouth, a form of Viral Marketing is supposed to be organic. [...]