Technology
Interview with Robert Scoble
Sorry for my blog posting pause. I am suffering post TechEd Las Vegas Stress Syndrom… which means I had a pretty bad cold.
I just browsed Flickr and found this great picture of me and Robert. Looking forward to see the full video on podtech.net very soon.
Also stay tuned for a great story about my participation in the demo jam.
SDN Day was Great!
I just came back to my hotel room in the Venetian after a long day at the SAP Developer Network day. It was great. Mark, Craig and team organized an excellent event with the right mixture of organized sessions and freestyle activities and meetings.
Mark Finnern kicked the event of with references to Burning Man and Foo camp.
After that a networking session allowed everyone to meet different members of the SDN community. Juergen, James and I started to get ready for the Flex hands-on workshop. In our two workshops we had about 50 attendees who brought their laptops to install Flex Builder and start developing Rich Internet Applications with Flex.
Here is James Ward demonstrating Flex Builder.
The hands-on sessions were very productive and we got a lot of positive feedback on the Flex Proof-of-Concept application which we developed with RoundArch (a Rich Internet Application for customer support linking back to an SAP application).
During the breaks I met Robert Scoble and later he did a brief interview with me talking about all the activities between Adobe and SAP. This should be available soon on the SAP channel of PodTech.net). I invited Robert to meet in Palo Alto or San Jose to give him a demo of all the work we have been doing with SAP on improving the user experience. Later in the day Robert also interviewed Shai.
We had also a lot of interest in the SDN sessions on SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe presented by Juergen Hauser, Les Woolsey, Blair Powell and Mohan Bethur. We are off to a great start and I expect a lot of people in our sessions and our booth during the next days at SAP TechEd.
Finally SDN Day closed with a party at the Hofbrauhaus in Las Vegas. Below is SDNer Harald Reiter and me enjoying a Weissbier. We had a lot of fun on our table and Mark, Craig and Thomas stopped by as well.
Its time to sleep and prepare for another big day tommorrow. I will present Interactive Forms with Markus Meisl as well as Apollo and the Adobe Engagement Platform as part of the SAP Client strategy presentation. Finally and most importantly I need to mentally prepare for the Demo Jam tomorrow evening. If your at SAP TechEd please support me with a lot of noise!
SAP TechEd Final Countdown
The last days have been pretty hectic. I am getting ready for SAP’s number one tech event the SAP TechEd. This meant installing SAP Web Application Server on VMWare, getting the demos ready, figuring out who needs to go to which workshop, preparing for the Demo Jam and many more things. I am flying to Las Vegas on Sunday and expect a long night since I still need to get an SAP Web AS ABAP server installed on a machine which is hopefully waiting for me in the hotel. I do not have a monitor yet, but hopefully someone can help me out (if you know where I could use a Monitor in the Venetian Hotel on Sunday afternoon/evening please let me know. Even better let me know if you have a box with the Web AS 6.40 ABAP stack which I could use for the SDN workshop).
I am very excited to meet Robert Scoble who will be at SDN Day (the SAP Developer Network Event the day before TechEd starts officially). He will do interviews for PodTech (Until today I did not realize they have an SAP Channel, cool!).
So here is a summary of the Adobe content at SAP TechEd and SDN Day we have lined up….
– Two hour hands-on workshop (bring your laptop) to develop Rich Internet Applications with Flex and connect them to SAP (if I can get the ABAP Server running 😉
– Four session around Interactive Forms at SDN Day, meaning talk to our developers about the technical details of SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe
– Demo Jam – Yes I will compete with a demo showing live coding in Flex Builder developing a cool Flex app connection to SAP in 6 minutes (Please support me with a lot of noise 
– 12 (!) presentations and workshops featuring Interactive Forms in SAP NetWeaver. This is a great opportunity to get educated on one of the hottest technology in SAP NetWeaver
– Exhibition Pods: We have one booth (booth #1) which features everything you want to know about Interactive Forms and allows you to talk to the experts (no sales or marketing people allowed on our booth!) and one pod (pod #1) in the NetWeaver village featuring Adobe Flex technology. It is great to be twice #1
Well I better get some rest before the crazy days start!
P.S. One more update – I will present the Adobe Engagement Platform and Apollo as part of SAP’s session “Next Generation of Client Technology for SAP“. We are absolutely dedicated to bring rich and engaging user experiences to SAP customers.
Funny SAP Facts
Make up funny facts about SAP and post them here…
SAP Facts (Chuck Norris style)
My favorites:
Oracle still hides the fact that FUSION stands for: Finally use SAP in our network
SAP is such a great software that initially there weren’t any errors.
But in order to have any work to do at all, they made up some bugs
SAP is so efficient in creating software, there is actually only one
developer writing code, all others are architects and managers
Flickr Geotagging Now Available
Now it is official: Flickr allows you to put geographical tags on your pictures and browse them by location on Yahoo! Maps. I just tried it and Flickr actually recognized that some of my pictures were already geotagged by Plazes and automatically imported the geographic information. Neat!
Boeing Drops Wireless In-Flight Internet Service
That is really upsetting. I liked the service and used it on every flight to/from Germany when it was available. It was actually a reason for me to prefer Lufthansa (which offered the service) over United. I thought the price was not outrageous (I think $29.99 for unlimited usage on a flight). CrunchGear reports…
Company chief Jim McNerney said, “Regrettably, the market for this service has not materialized as had been expected. We believe this decision best balances the long-term interests of all parties with a stake in Connexion by Boeing.â€
CrunchGear » Blog Archive » Boeing Drops Connexion
I hope since the equipment is now installed on the planes that Lufthansa and other airlines can find an alternative service provider for the satellite Internet service.
BTW, I am sitting at the SFO ariport waiting for my flight to Munich… maybe one of the last flights with Broadband Internet…
Challenges with embedding YouTube video into WordPress Blog
Today I tried to integrate a YouTube video into my WordPress. It did not work out of the box. Initially the video would break the layout in Firefox and not show up in Internet Explorer. It turned out that the problem is the Rich Text Editor in WordPress. Even if you select the HTML editing mode and copy over the HTML provided by YouTube it fails.
To make it work I changed back to the older WordPress Editor…
1. Login to WordPress admin
2. Go to Options >> Writing
3. Uncheck both Users should use the visual rich editor by default &
WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically
4. Go to Users
5. Uncheck Use the visual rich editor when writing
6. Go to Write >> Write Post
7. Paste the ’embeddable player’ code for your YouTube video in the write box
8. In the code change the width of the player to “500” (depends on your template, but in my template the standard “600”setting ruined the layout in IE.
8. Publish blog
Now it works (see my previous blog entry).
New Alpine Car Multimedia System
A week ago I decided to finally update the sound system of my car. A main decision criteria was to get a very good connectivity to my iPod. After doing some research I decided to go with the Alpine Mobile Multimedia System IVA-W200. It has an excellent video touch screen and an easy and fast way to navigate the iPod. I got it installed at Bay Car Stereo in Mountain View and they did an excellent job.
Here is a short video how to navigate the iPod from the Alpine.
2nd Web Montag in Silicon Valley – Unite German and American Techies
I attended the first Web Montag in Mountain View in June and really enjoyed the opportunity to exchange various technology ideas. I presented a Flex 2 application integrated with SAP web services. About half of the attendees were Germans or Swiss and the others Americans with an interest in Germany. I was really intrigued by the presentation of Stefan and Felix who build Plazes, a web site which keeps track where you last logged on to the Internet. I became addicted and use it a lot (as you can see from my Plazes batch on top of the Blog).
David Hornik (VentureBlog), just wrote about Entrepreneurship In Europe. I agree with him that it is even harder to build a successful start-up in Europe. What is important to understand however is that Europe is not one country. Each individual European country continues to have its own culture and therefore also deals differently with technology and start-up businesses. A lot of activity is actually going on in Ireland, but as you can tell from initiatives like the interest in Web Montags all over Germany other countries have grass roots efforts as well. As we discussed at Web Montag a major hurdle of starting a company in Germany is the fact that in case you fail (which is very likely) your reputation can be ruined. Therefore fewer entrepreneurs take the risk of starting a company. Interestingly several Silicon Valley executives came to the same conclusion in a meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The 2nd Web Montag in Silicon Valley will take place on August 14. Now you have the opportunity to join the discussion and help foster American German technology relationships around Web 2.0. I hope Shel Israel reads this and has a chance to attend since he is doing research for his next book “Global Neighborhoods”. Unfortunately I cannot attend since I will be in Los Angeles for a short vacation. But I certainly will come again next time.
Crossing the Chasm by Giving Away Software for Free?
Over on FlexLive.net Zee is discussing ideas how to increase the adoption of Adobe LiveCycle software. LiveCycle is Adobe’s product family of J2EE server software for forms and document creation and management in the enterprise.
Zee writes…
“Well, first the product managers have to realize that grass-roots adoption matters even for enterprise prodcuts…
Hopefully, core products in the LiveCycle lineup such as the form server and the workflow engine could all be made free by the LiveCycle 8 release.”
I agree that it is important to ensure that enterprise developers get easy access to the software for evaluation and prototyping through a Developer Network. However the decision to introduce new enterprise software applications in a productive evironment includes other factors. I would argue the license fee of enterprise software is typically only a minor factor in Total Cost of Ownership considerations.
An important element to enterprise adoption is the requirement that the new software integrates seemlessly with existing enterprise applications (what I like to call “being a good corporate citizen”). IT departments are busy maintaining and updating existing software; Introducing new software means stress and uncertainty.
Making it easy to deploy, integrate and maintain the software in an existing infrastrutcure will lower the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership of the software) and therefore make a decision to introduce new technology easier.
Therefore Adobe decided to partner with other enterprise software companies. Specifically our strategic partnership with SAP is an important element to accomplish wide adoption of LiveCycle… and yes I am biased since I am the Product Manager for the SAP Adobe partnership. Over three years ago we started to work with SAP to tightly integrate forms functionality into SAP applications. I actually spent two years in the SAP headquarter in Walldorf to facilitate the integration and evangelize Adobe software.
Today SAP is shipping core componets of LiveCycle (incl. the LiveCycle Designer and modules from LiveCycle Forms) as part of their SAP NetWeaver application platform. It is called SAP Interactive Forms by Adobe and actually is included in the default installation of the SAP Web Application Server. Interactive Forms provides the infrastructure for both print forms (e.g. invoices, orders, paystubs, tax forms) as well as interactive PDF forms in SAP applications. SAP is currently migrating over 2000 print form templates from legacy technology to Adobe based forms technology (about 900 forms are already migrated and available with mySAP ERP 2005). It is just a matter of time (since it takes SAP customers a number of years to upgrade to new releases) till every SAP customer will use Adobe forms technology. Given that SAP owns the majority of the enterprise software market I would argue that this is a pretty good strategy to cross the chasm.
So to a degree we are actually already executing a twist of Zee’s idea. The core forms technology is delivered free to all SAP customers as part of SAP NetWeaver. The license allows SAP cutomers to use the technology free of charge for print forms. Only if customers want to use interactive PDF forms in a production environment they require an additional license (which is distributed by SAP).
Finally since Interactive Forms is based on LiveCycle Forms technology other products like LiveCycle Policy Server or LiveCycle Barcoded Forms will be of interest to SAP customers as well.
“I doubt any LiveCycle product manager would be reading my blog, but like I said, grass-roots matters.”
Well, I am reading your Blog and I also forwarded it to the LiveCycle Product Management team.
