Notching It Up on the Portal Front

Apparently taking cues from Microsoft, Google late Tuesday announced that it would allow users to personalize their homepage much in the way Live.com already works. The new feature would allow for drag and drop organization, as well as an API to build “modules” for use on the homepage.Microsoft allows much of the same functionality through its Microsoft Gadgets framework. Both make use of RSS feeds, and can use various Web technologies to give the mini-applications functionality.

BetaNews | Google Adds Widgets to Homepage

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Amazon Fires Latest Shot in Search Wars

Amazon on Tuesday rolled out the Alexa Web Search Platform, which opens up 5 billion documents and 300 terabytes of data to anyone, along with offering computer and storage time for processing tasks. The idea is to enable the creation of new services that utilize Alexa’s vast Web archive and search technology.

BetaNews | Amazon Opens Up Alexa Search Index

This of course got lots of blog coverage.  The big take away: developers can reach into the what Alex has crawled and develop services on top of it for reasonable fees.  Look for some exciting search products to turn up shortly and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Google API opens up a bit more.

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MySQL Moves Further into the Business Realm

The Small Customer Bundle costs $4,000 and joins MySQL Certified Binaries with Business Object’s Data Integrator (DI) Basic, Crystal Reports and CR Server software. The price includes unlimited installation help and five incidents of online support from Business Objects, as well as licenses for one source and one designer for DI Basic, five named users for CR Server and one named user for Crystal Reports.

MySQL, Business Objects team for bundled offerings – Computerworld

I wonder if CALI needs to go down this road?  It may be a help to us to have real commercial apps for some of the routine reporting we need thereby freeing up our time to do other cool things.

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