From the founder's weblog, it seems RealNames was doing pretty well at one point:
"We were profitable and growing fast (about 120% a quarter back in Q1 2002.
Secondly, we had an awesome business model. Resellers all over the world were selling Keywords. Most uptake was in China, Korea and Japan where we were the only way to make local languages useable as navigational addresses. We had pretty strict controls on ownership but we were able to segment nations into seperate namespaces. Today we would do local keywords too.
Thirdly, we were doing 1 billion resolutions a quarter in Q1 2002. That was page views that MSN lost to us because we were able to provide direct navigation to a web page from a keyword. Microsoft decided to close us down in order to regain those page views. Search this blog for the story.
There is a patent. You (Yahoo) own it through your acquisition of 3721."
There is some merit to the concept -- the web browser would theoretically work better if it had one input box instead of two (the address bar and the search bar)
But it's hard to envision ICANN letting loose of TLD's that freely. The price they want for a domain is rediculous...
the best interface I've seen for PHP is:
http://phplens.com/lens/
It's very nice for PHP database development, but it is not FileMaker. Good news is, since it's built w/ ADODB interface it'll hook up to a large number of popular databases, so maybe with a little bit of PHP work you can have your system moved to a more scalable environment.
Overall a good question, and a surprisingly poor showing from the FOSS community!:P
It's a complete reflection on the founders' failures to achieve their own PhD's.
I say, "good for them." I've worked with a number of PhD's over the years, and they were all great programmers and software engineers, though none of them studied Computer "Science!" As for me, usually their peers in the organizations, I dropped out of high school, and make 75% as much as them. I figure the price of going back to school for the PhD is not worth the extra salary. I mean, we both end up taking orders from the same and a totally different type of beast... the MBA. I wonder how many of those Google has on the management side? Or is the place just a bunch of scientists banding up to show what kind of cool things they can make, like PARC to which the article refers. Anybody been there lately? There's still some PhD's hanging around making cool stuff. And an eerie of pride for the rich history of innovation, and embarrasment for the failure of any long term financial success to keep the place flourishing. Just like the Google founders, incredibly proud for making what they have, and incredible shame for not finishing what they set out to in the first place - their degrees!
I've worked in many companies and seen these types of developer marketing initiatives fail because the marketing group was too distant from the very developers engineering the product. Make sure to take time to relate to the people actually building the product, for they've got the most insight and experience with how to use it, and what you can do with it.
Make sure to spend ample time with your company's engineers at Harrington's, Attitude's, and other local bars, to not only pick their brains, but to build with them a strong repoir so if you ever need to count on them for a solution or a fix or a quick HOW-TO guide, they'll be there for you. You may also want to improve your SSX Tricky skills and contribute to the white board every so often.
I would love it if my company switched to an XML based document repository, but the biggest problem we face is that certain collegues _need_ to use Microsoft Word, and at present, we don't have the $$ to justify purchasing a mid 5 figure document conversion program.
Does anyone know of maybe an open-source project that is trying to achieve document conversion between a standard XML DTD (like DocBook?) and MS Word? It would have to be able to convert both XML->DOC and DOC->XML. Maybe an inexpensive solution for smaller organizations?
Slashdot Mirror
There is some merit to the concept -- the web browser would theoretically work better if it had one input box instead of two (the address bar and the search bar)
But it's hard to envision ICANN letting loose of TLD's that freely. The price they want for a domain is rediculous...
the best interface I've seen for PHP is: http://phplens.com/lens/ It's very nice for PHP database development, but it is not FileMaker. Good news is, since it's built w/ ADODB interface it'll hook up to a large number of popular databases, so maybe with a little bit of PHP work you can have your system moved to a more scalable environment. Overall a good question, and a surprisingly poor showing from the FOSS community! :P
It's a complete reflection on the founders' failures to achieve their own PhD's.
I say, "good for them." I've worked with a number of PhD's over the years, and they were all great programmers and software engineers, though none of them studied Computer "Science!" As for me, usually their peers in the organizations, I dropped out of high school, and make 75% as much as them. I figure the price of going back to school for the PhD is not worth the extra salary. I mean, we both end up taking orders from the same and a totally different type of beast... the MBA. I wonder how many of those Google has on the management side? Or is the place just a bunch of scientists banding up to show what kind of cool things they can make, like PARC to which the article refers. Anybody been there lately? There's still some PhD's hanging around making cool stuff. And an eerie of pride for the rich history of innovation, and embarrasment for the failure of any long term financial success to keep the place flourishing. Just like the Google founders, incredibly proud for making what they have, and incredible shame for not finishing what they set out to in the first place - their degrees!
I've worked in many companies and seen these types of developer marketing initiatives fail because the marketing group was too distant from the very developers engineering the product. Make sure to take time to relate to the people actually building the product, for they've got the most insight and experience with how to use it, and what you can do with it.
Make sure to spend ample time with your company's engineers at Harrington's, Attitude's, and other local bars, to not only pick their brains, but to build with them a strong repoir so if you ever need to count on them for a solution or a fix or a quick HOW-TO guide, they'll be there for you. You may also want to improve your SSX Tricky skills and contribute to the white board every so often.
Dr. Evil
I would love it if my company switched to an XML based document repository, but the biggest problem we face is that certain collegues _need_ to use Microsoft Word, and at present, we don't have the $$ to justify purchasing a mid 5 figure document conversion program. Does anyone know of maybe an open-source project that is trying to achieve document conversion between a standard XML DTD (like DocBook?) and MS Word? It would have to be able to convert both XML->DOC and DOC->XML. Maybe an inexpensive solution for smaller organizations?