MindTouch Unleashes the Power of Big Data with Newest Release

April 26th, 2010 | | Press Release

Newest version of industry’s leading collaboration platform delivers up to 12x performance improvement for ‘data-heavy’ sites

SAN DIEGO, April 26, 2010 — MindTouch, the industry’s leading open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint, today announced the availability of the newest version of the MindTouch Collaboration Platform, the best solution for how teams and companies collaborate today. This newest release enables companies that service large numbers of online users to confidently unleash the power of rich media, data transfer and rapid application development to their collaboration experience.

As customers have been successful in developing their own micro-apps on top of the MindTouch platform, this performance boost not only improves the speed of native applications, but integrates a new level of speed in customer and partner applications.

“MindTouch’s new feature set will be a welcome addition to maintaining our online presence”, said Miguel de Icaza, Vice President, Developer Platform at Novell. “We’re very pleased with MindTouch as a platform for all of our new content sites, particularly as we continue to see exponential data increases.”

“Performance is critical to the success of our customers, many of whom service millions of users each day,” said Aaron Fulkerson, CEO, MindTouch. “As these sites continue to grow in size and complexity, this performance boost will enable them to breathe new life into legacy apps, and seamlessly manage large amounts of data and applications, while continuing to adopt new users.”

The term “Big Data” is continuing to gain traction within the IT and enterprise 2.0 communities. “Big Data” is a particularly relevant concept to MindTouch customers managing volumes upon volumes of digital media files and/or millions of site visitors, as well as those whose applications rapidly change to meet market needs.

MindTouch has leveraged its extensible and robust WOA/REST architecture to seamlessly employ the new performance boost through an efficient code library edition, obviating the need for customers to have to re-install a new product. The release is being made available as a simple upgrade to existing and new commercial customers of the MindTouch platform.

Download your copy of MindTouch Enterprise today.

MindTouch is the industry’s leading provider of enterprise collaboration solutions in a market that continues to grow rapidly as more companies are operating under “lite” IT budgets for the foreseeable future. Enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies is predicted by Forrester to grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013.

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The Most Powerful Voices in Open Source

March 17th, 2010 | | Awards and Press

The Open Source community has many influential and important people. Yet some individuals tend to hold a bigger megaphone than the rest of us. Some of these people are well recognized while others exist in open source niches. But collectively they’re all the most vocal, followed and re-posted open source commentators in the community today. These are people you need to know.

In compiling our ranking of the most powerful voices in open source, we struggled to find the appropriate metrics to measure both broadcast power and profundity. After some lengthy discussions, we decided to create a Most Powerful Voices (MPV) formula to use as a yardstick. We finally settled on seven key dimensions based on input from a number of third party sites.

I believe we got the MPV formula right by asking the right questions.

We first set out to determine reach by examining the number of followers and buzz an individual has on sites like Twitter and Google. We then needed to determine how much impact an individual had with their followers and subscribers. We asked questions like: How often were they retweeted? How much buzz is created around their blog posts, tweets, and other messages? How often is the individual referenced in the blogosphere? Were they cited by influential people?

The MPV formula illustrates how much additional broadcast power an individual has versus an average active person (defined below). For example, Tim O’Reilly has 1.4 million times more broadcast power reach than the average person, while Mark Hinkle has a respectable 55 times more broadcast power than average.

The Top 20 Most Powerful Voices in Open Source

Read more…

MindTouch Announces First-Ever “Most Powerful Voices in Open Source” Ranking

March 17th, 2010 | | Press Release

MindTouch leverages wealth of Enterprise and Web 2.0 metrics to identify the most powerful “broadcasters” of the open source message

MindTouch Most Powerful VoiceOpen Source Business Conference, SAN FRANCISCO, March 17, 2010 — MindTouch, the open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint, today announced its publishing of the “Most Powerful Voices in Open Source” (MPV) ranking. The list presents the top 50 most vocal, followed and repeated/re-posted open source commentators, representing several spheres of influence, including media, vendors, OSS projects, standards bodies, community management and more.

Created by MindTouch, the MPV ranking draws from the wide array of metrics available through Web and Enterprise 2.0 channels, including Twitter, Google News alerts, unique online visitor counts and analysis of the related “buzz” of vendor/project affiliations. This compilation was created using the MindTouch platform, federating these data sources, applying varied weighting, and processing it for delivery of the ranking. The list, which includes members worldwide from organizations such as Ars Technica, Canonical, Google and SpringSource, is available in its entirety here: www.mindtouch.com/blog.

The top 5 MPVs are:

  • Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media
  • Linus Torvalds, founder of Linux, open source advocate
  • Chris Messina, open web advocate, Google
  • Miguel de Icaza, founder, Mono and Gnome projects
  • Jonathan Schwartz, former CEO of Sun Microsystems

“It’s about time someone has put together a metrics-based ranking of open source influencers,” said Larry Augustin, CEO, SugarCRM. “Community advocacy is the major thrust of the spirit of open source, and communities have leaders. This list does a great job of identifying those leading voices.”

“Open source is collaborative by its very nature, and we are lucky to have so many vocal leaders communicating on the industry’s behalf,” said Ian Howells, CMO, Alfresco. “The fact these voices from every avenue of influence – media, vendors and end-users alike – demonstrates the continued importance of open source and community collaboration.”

“You’ll see that this ranking is no popularity contest, there are a number of surprises outside of the ‘usual suspects’ often seen on this type of list,” said Aaron Fulkerson, CEO of MindTouch. “This is because we let the numbers do the talking, instead of an emotions-based market perception that too frequently comes into play.”

MindTouch is the industry’s leading provider of enterprise collaboration solutions in a market that continues to grow rapidly as more companies are operating under “lite” IT budgets for the foreseeable future. Enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies is predicted by Forrester to grow strongly over the next five years, reaching $4.6 billion globally by 2013.

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CodePlex Foundation: Microsoft, an Open Source Leader?

September 13th, 2009 | | Editorial

CodePlex Foundation logoLast week I joined the advisory board of the newly created CodePlex Foundation, which was forged in the bowels of Microsoft. Sounds scary doesn’t it?

The foundation, a 501.c6 non-profit, endeavors to increase participation in open source community projects. The intent is to provide a framework for commercial (proprietary) software companies to more easily contribute to open source projects. Specifically, the CodePlex Foundation wishes to help resolve concerns commonly shared among commercial software companies about contributions downstream; such as implied patents, copyright, licensing, etc.

How will the CodePlex Foundation compare to other open source foundations?

Excerpted from the CodePlex Foundation:

Other foundations are targeted at particular projects, platforms, or applications, such as Firefox and the Mozilla Foundation, or Gnome and the Gnome Foundation. We wanted a foundation that addresses a full spectrum of software projects, and does so with the licensing and intellectual property needs of commercial software companies in mind. Having said that, we expect the Codeplex Foundation to be complimentary to, and not competitive with, other open source foundations. One measure of our success will be if other foundations experience an increase in participation from commercial software developers because of us.

[Emphasis added]

Put away your tin foil hat. In my opinion, The motivation is simple.

Read more…

MindTouch Releases First Service-Oriented Wiki

July 24th, 2007 | | Press Release

Free open source platform for online communities and enterprise collaboration unveiled

San Diego, CA – July 24, 2007 – MindTouch today announced the immediate availability of MindTouch Deki “Hayes”, a free open source wiki and application platform for communities and enterprises. MindTouch Deki is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL v2). For download and other information, visit http://wiki.opengarden.org/Deki_Wiki/Release/Hayes.

“MindTouch Deki ‘Hayes’ is a powerful platform for developers to bridge many disparate applications, databases or data stores,” said Aaron Fulkerson, co-founder and vice president of Products at MindTouch. “We’re also giving non-techie users the ability to create composite applications and data mashups, making this an excellent vehicle for social media creation and aggregation.”

MindTouch Deki has an award-winning user interface and robust feature set that includes: WYSIWYG editing, advanced permissions, file versioning and indexing, image galleries, and more. Among its many new features is a comprehensive API, which allows MindTouch Deki to integrate with other applications using XML, JSON or PHP. The API provides methods for operating on pages, files and users, enabling developers to extend their applications with wiki capabilities.

“MindTouch Deki delivers an innovative language agnostic application platform. Being built on Mono also makes MindTouch Deki system agnostic,” said Miguel de Icaza, vice president for Developer Platforms at Novell and founder of the Gnome and Mono projects. “With MindTouch Deki Hayes, MindTouch has combined the most flexible deployment options with the most advanced wiki feature set available.”

Also introduced is an innovative service-oriented extension model where Web applications and services become accessible through MindTouch Deki. For example, an extension could be invoked to compute results in a table or visualized as a graph. Extensions, which can be hosted anywhere, can operate on content to present it in alternative formats. For example, content can easily be converted into images, charts, or graphs. MindTouch Deki ships with several extension services including Microsoft Windows Live services, maps, Widgetbox widgets, photo effects, and more.

“Adding services, like Microsoft Windows Live Controls, as a built-in component to a wiki is super interesting; MindTouch Deki is truly breaking new ground,” said George Moore, general manager, Windows Live Platform at Microsoft.

Other new features in MindTouch Deki “Hayes” include:

  • Support for multiple authentication services including OpenLDAP, Drupal, Active Directory, WordPress, and Joomla
  • Full skinning and customization capabilities
  • Tagging, chronological tagging, tag categories
  • Commenting
  • Media gallery and image tools
  • Support for embedding rich media like videos and widgets
  • And more…

Thousands of organizations have already deployed MindTouch Deki and are reaping the benefits. Flexible and easy to use, it features an intuitive WYSIWYG editing experience, making MindTouch Deki an ideal choice for intranets, extranets, and interactive web sites. It can also power community sites and encyclopedic resources, and serve as a platform for social content creation and aggregation. MindTouch Deki is powerful, supported, and enterprise-ready. To learn more, visit http://MindTouch.com or MindTouch’s developer community at http://OpenGarden.org.

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