Infosys to announce successor to Narayana Murthy tomorrow

NewKerla.com says :  Infosys to announce successor to Narayana Murthy tomorrow

Infosys will tomorrow announce a successor to its Chairman and Chief Mentor N R Narayana Murthy, who is relinquishing his posts on attaining the age of 60 on August 20.

Shopping cart in Java, any ready-to-use?

As a open source enthusiast, I ventured looking for a open source full fledged “Shopping cart” in Java! There are excellent ones in PHP but I was primarily looking for ones written in Java.

Found lot of them doing Krugle, checked in SourceForge that most of the so-called shopping cart application no longer exist in sf.net repositary. I hope somebody is reading this from Sf.net to take a note that “let’s keep only those open source in repositary which has some source file in it“.

Out of the 5 shopping cart I found, I did a quick scan to understand 1) depolyment hassles 2) application configuration issues 3) adptability(is it easy to learn and add/modify code if required) 4) is it big for a small scale cart application. My findings are as follows. In brief, if you ever need a shopping cart in java, use JPetStore and adapt it to your need.

1.JSPShop
Seems to be very old, need changes to configuration to support running inside JBoss.
Uses CMP EJB inside the application, uses classes from a company called submersion.com, I think they were owning the product?
I din’t see any license stating GPL/etc inside the source.But when I downloaded from Sourceforge, I see GPL license is mentioned there.
Needs JBoss/Application to run the application

I don’t think a small customer looking for a simple few pages and few classes type shopping cart can invest time in tweaking this application!

2.rest-client-1.0.2
Downloaded as it is mentioned shopping cart ..I find the code has lot of classes but nothing todo with shopping cart !!! Am’I missing something?

3.karpuz

This application has all client side …like menu item lisitng, adding to shopping list, and submit for checkout.
But beyond that there is no database support, no third party payment integration support..etc available.

Go ahead, implement on top of this.

4.Openedit-cart (this is part of openEdit CMS product and open source)

It seems to have more stuff for a simple cart. Their latest war (openedit-cart.war,11-Jul-2006 00:14:30 failed to work in Tomcat 5.5.
Also I think using this shopping cart forces user to go thorugh openedit CMS!!

5.JPet Store 5(not the Sun one but the one with IBatis stuff). I got the latest release 5.

It has all the features for a small scale shopping cart like item list, checkout, update cart, payment capture, few nice UI screens. Backend database support for Mysql,orcl, etc. I think for name sake it is called JPet store otherwise it is small shopping cart.

I think whoever needs basic shopping cart should adapt JPetStore and add few plugin code for PayPal/etc rather than investing time in other shopping cart applications.

Do you know some more???, leave us a comment here.

End-to-End Support Model for Product Lifecycle Management

AMR Research has an excellent article on “Product Lifecycle Management”

Product innovation is getting boardroom attention. Companies are directly blaming missed revenue goals on their inability to develop new products. More senior executives and board members are being asked about their company’s product development strategies and their plans for improving them. More stakeholders are asking:

* Is the product development process financially under control?

* Is the process strategically under control?

* Is the process fast enough?

* Is the process as cost effective as it can be?

Note :- See the AMR Research’s End-to-End Support Model for Product Lifecycle Management here http://www.amrresearch.com/content/resourcecenter.asp?id=433

Accident Innovation :)

HBS Working Knowledge has an excellent article on Accident Innovation with author Sarah Jane Gilbert

Companies spend many hundreds of billions of dollars on R&D each year, but the microwave oven was conceived from a melted candy bar, saccharin from an accidental chemical spill, and the Daguerre photo process via a shattered thermometer. Accidents happen—and we’re all better off because they do.

Q: Is there a way innovators can encourage good accidents? In other words, is there anything we can control to foster this process?

A:In 1960, a guy named [Donald] Campbell proposed that we think of creativity as “Random variation + Selective Retention.” That is, we need two processes, one to generate things we can’t think of in advance, and another to figure out which of the things we generate are valuable and are worth keeping and building upon.

Ad spending on the Internet

Clickz says : Ad spending on the Internet is now expected to account for 7 percent of global ad spend by 2008.

Small-Business CRM: Hosted or In-House?

CIO-TODAY says “Hosted applications are definitely a money-saving proposition because companies can start out slowly and grow their business around it.”

According to Robert Boise, research director at AMR’s customer-management practice, 45 percent of small businesses are doing some type of CRM activity with hosted services. “This is the highest penetration yet,” Boise said.

Open Source Lincense, Dirty code

ITBusinessEdge has an interesting article on open source license which points to CIO article

Dirty code, according to intellectual property lawyers, has led to expensive delays during many mergers and acquisitions. And thanks to the efforts of a single programmer—Linux kernel contributor Harald Welte—at least 100 companies have been forced either to remove or release as open-source various pieces of GPL code that they borrowed without properly complying with the license.

The artcile has excellent tips, one of them is as follows

The key is to give developers rules for when and how to integrate external code of any type into their projects. “What is very clear,” Radcliffe says, “is that if the people who are actually doing the coding don’t have direction and some type of enforcement mechanism, they’re going to pull whatever they can off the Internet whenever they can.”

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My take on this is, Open source adaptation is really slow due to mulitple license and complexity of understanding GPL/LGPL/AFL/many others. I think the software development organization must enforce strict guidlines in making sure that the developer has written code from his own logic or at best has learned the trade and applied the trick on his own language. Thereby ensuring customer gets license-free code.

SiliconBeat meet-up in London, 8th July 06

SiliconBeat folks (Matt and Micheal) are planning a meet up on 8th July 06 in London. More on the meet up here http://www.siliconbeat.com/entries/2006/07/02/siliconbeat_meetup_in_london_sat_july_8.html
See you guys there.

TiE-UK Business Plan competition

TiE-UK chapter is conducting Business Plan Competition on 5th July 06 in London. More details are here http://www.tie-uk.org/

Adipt’s team is attending the same and looking forward to support upcoming entrepreneurs. Adipt has been building new ideas to successfull products for many customers.

See you there.

Developing custom application based on product approach

McKinsey has an interesting article on “developing custom application based on product approach”. The article link is here

“They have adopted the approach of software vendors, which package and sell applications aimed at the common needs of many customers rather than of individuals, by writing an application once and then selling it many times.

Some of these companies have begun to experiment with applying the lessons of packaged software—write once, sell to many—to the development of customized applications as well.

For businesses that can benefit from product-oriented approaches, we offer the following lessons from early adopters:

* Build the products “prospectively,” mindful not just of the existing base of applications but also of future needs.
* Organize groups to deliver products effectively against business needs and not just technology outcomes.
* Pay attention to organizational factors that will ensure proper governance and realize the business benefits.”