Spam?

We're seeing lots (hundreds) of 'undelivered email' messages coming into our email accounts today. This means that someone has marked their unsolicited commercial email (SPAM) with email addresses ending '@infopatterns.net'. This is a common spammers trick and does not mean our email system has been compromised. You can find an article about it here: Email Address Forgery.

If you receive spam messages that appear to come from Information Patterns, I'm sorry you've been targetted, but we have no control over this.

Live Mesh

Jon Udell discusses Live Mesh with Ray Ozzie. When I tried to register for the beta version, it was already full, so I've yet to see see it, however here's an interesting quote from Ray, which applies to those of us who have been running our companies on Groove and developing applications for it.

"But the DNA elements are the basic sync model, the basic interaction model. The biggest difference between Groove and Notes was that Groove embraced the concept of ad-hoc interaction much more in terms of inviting people into a shared environment. So those invitation models are essentially borrowed from Groove into Live Mesh. So if you are a Groove user, you will feel very comfortable with that model in dealing with Live Mesh".

Email server changes

We're moving our email server this weekend. If you get a 'user does not exist' message, please try again later.

The Technology of Tracking Human Disease

Attending this conference? Be sure to catch RayJordan from our partners D2i Solutions, who will be demonstrating how Toucan Navigate 2007 and Groove can be used together to track disease outbreaks, assess at-risk populations and manage an effective response.

Linking Toucan Navigate and Zoho Creator

I have been reviewing Zoho Creator (www.zoho.com) recently and decided to create a quick prototype to illustrate how it could be used with our Toucan mapping tool to do something useful.

Here's a simple scenario taken from my college studies in Urban Planning - looking at the relationship between the location of Fast Food Franchises and major highways. My main objective was to accomplish this without a single line of code (no html, no javascript, no nothing) and yet provide enough functionality to answer some basic questions, hence making this potentially useful in the business world.

Specifically, I wanted to:

1. Have more than one person enter,update or view Franchise data (i.e. collaborate)
   
2. Dynamically filter the data (by Franchise or by State).
3. Display thousands of records on a map.

In less than ten minutes I assembled this (I did have the data). The form below is used to capture data.

The ZC View is used to filter the data by Franchise or by State and to save the Filtered or all the (aprox. 20,000 records) and save them as .csv file (needed by Toucan Navigate).

Toucan Navigate is used to display all or a partial list (i.e. filtered) of the records stored and maintained in ZC.

So here it is - a map clearly showing the concentration of Fast Food Places along the I-95 corridor.

You can check the ZC app here: Fast Food Tracker

And download a trial (full feature) version of Toucan Navigate.

Bambuco Desktop gains Microsoft Certification

late last year, we submitted Bambuco for testing, and I'm pleased to report that

"Bambuco Desktop has been tested and meets the criteria for the Microsoft “Platform Test for ISV Solutions” program:  Windows Client, SQL Server 2005, Managed Code and Web Services + .NET Framework."

In plain speaking, this means Bambuco has passed tests for connecting and working with SQL Server and web services. There was no test relevant for the Groove-specific aspect, otherwise we'd have submitted it for that. The core code that makes up 90% of Bambuco is shared with our other products, which is a nice confidence booster.

"Testing was conducted independently by VeriTest, a testing service of Lionbridge Technologies."

Mark recognized for his contributions to the Groove community

Today we've found out that Mark Smith, one of the founders of Information Patterns has been awarded with the 2008 Microsoft® MVP Award. For more than five years Mark has devoted his talents to enhancing Groove and to helping others who are using Groove. The products that Mark has developed have been very useful to many entities around the world - in many cases for emergency response or disaster relief .
CONGRATULATIONS to Mark!