Podcast: IBM’s SmartCamp Program for Entrepreneurs with Mike Riegel

On Episode 143 of Taking Notes we interview IBM’s Mike Riegel (@mikeriegel, LinkedIn, Blog), Vice President – ISVs, Startups, Developers, and Academic Programs. We talked about IBM’s SmartCamp program and what it’s all about.

Topics included:

  • When people think about Big Blue, start up companies isn’t something that comes to mind. So when I heard about your SmartCamp program and some of the other things you are doing around the world for entrepreneurs I was a little surprised. Tell us what exactly is IBM doing with StartUps and Entrepreneurs?
  • Why are entrepreneurs and start ups important to IBM?
  • What is a SmartCamp?
  • Is it working? How successful are previous participants?
  • Are you looking for companies that are doing work in collaboration and social business?
  • How does a startup company qualify for SmartCamps?
  • What should our listeners do if they want to participate in 2012?
  • I heard the World Finals is coming up. What do you expect to see from the companies taking part?
  • and much more…

The show runs 25:25.

Download Episode 143 >

 

Taking Notes: The start of year 7

It’s hard to believe that Julian and I have been producing Taking Notes for six years now. Geez, it’s hard to imagine doing anything for 6 years nowadays! During 2011 we produced 14 shows, not nearly the number we have produced in prior years however, the shows we have done have had commendable download stats.

This year we decided to venture outside the topic areas we have covered in the past, and personally it has been extremely rewarding. Some of my favorite shows included the one we did with Rick Turcozy of the Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE), the one with Appcelerator CEO Jeff Haynie and my personal favorite the interview with Scott Kveton, CEO of Urban Airship. Oh and the recent episode with Mark Myers on NoSQL is now in record breaking territory. I received some nice compliments from some IBMers yesterday who really enjoyed the show with Mark.

I would like to take this opportunity on behalf of Julian and myself to thank you all for your support. Having shows with 25,000+ downloads is mind-blowing. As my friend Mac OS Ken says – “you rock”.

Thanks again to all of you for listening and supporting Taking Notes.

Domino Designer 9.0

Yeap it’s true, Domino Designer 9.0 has arrived. That is our dog “Domino Designer” (yes we named our dog that back in 2002). Domino has finally surpassed Lotus product version numbers with this birthday.

While Domino Designer has moved on from developing Notes/Domino doggie apps for his customer base, he now is heavily involved in the development of DogOS for the local cat community. Most of his work is still under NDA however, his PR agency says that his next app does not include the word “social“. He did indicate that he is using NoBiscuitSQL as the backend database technology. He has enlisted the assistance of his sister Bella Luna to help with the UX work.

Domino is currently looking for angel investors as he has found that his social security and 401(k) have dwindled away with the recent US debt crisis follies.

Domino Designer at Cannon Beach, Oregon

Happy birthday Domino Designer!

Welcome to Failure Club

Failure Club is a riveting new series from Morgan Spurlock. The show follows seven people who risk it all to chase their dream. In our launch episode, we explore the origin of Failure Club and learn what our new season has in store. Catch new episodes of ‘Failure Club’ every Friday at 10 a.m. PST/1 p.m. EST here on Yahoo! Screen.

Some of you may remember Phil Kiracofe who worked with Nathan T. Freeman at MFJ International, the makers of the once popular OverQuota CRM systems for Lotus Notes.

Hat tip to Nathan for sharing this video with me.

Video: Scaling your website with Memcached

Hopefully by now you had a chance to listen to Mark Myers of the London Developer Co-Op talk about NoSQL and Memcached on Episode 142 of The Taking Notes podcast. As I learn more about NoSQL solutions including MongoDB and Memcached I want to share with you some of my favorite info tidbits.

In this video Robert Scoble interviews James Phillips, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Northscale Technology providers of elastic data infrastructure software. They talk about Memecached and Membase. Membase is a product sold by Northscale.

 

Updated: IBM Connections iOS App V3.1.1

IBM® Connections is social software for business. It enables you to build a network of colleagues and subject matter experts, and then leverage that network to further your business goals. With its integrated suite of tools, you can share and discuss ideas, work collaboratively on presentations or proposals, plan and track project tasks, and much more. IBM Connections is a web application that is deployed on a company intranet to promote collaboration within the company. The IBM Connections mobile application extends access to company data to employees who are on the go directly from their iPhone and iPad.

What’s New in Version 3.1.1

• Support special characters in credentials
• Support for opening a WordPerfect file in the WordPerfect viewer app
• Fixed an issue with using the Japanese Romaji keyboard
• Fixed an issue with sorting the Files lists
• Fixed an issue with a port number in the server URL being removed

  

Download IBM Connections V3.1.1 for iOS >

Team effort = XSnippets

Last week OpenNTF introduced the XSnippets code sharing beta. XSnippets allows developers to share “code snippets” quickly and easily. XSnippets is replacing the original OpenNTF “Code Bin” that served the community for many years. Once the XSnippets beta is over the template will be made available as open source on OpenTF.

XSnippets was developed by IBM’s Niklas Heidloff, developi’s Serdar Basegmez and e-Office’s Frank van der Linden and myself. We began the XSnippets project back in September and used LotusLive to coordinate project activities and the OpenNTF SVN server for source control management. Recently Rene Winkelmeyer joined the development team. Rene will be creating an Eclipse plugin and associated server-side code to surface XSnippets in Domino Designer.

XSnippets includes the following features:

  • Source code highlighting
  • Viewing snippets by language
  • A list of popular snippets
  • Recently added snippets
  • Snippets by author

Please visit the XSnippets site (http://openntf.org/xsnippets) and contribute some of your code snippets. While you are there feel free to browse the snippets added by others.

Moved to WordPress

Last week I finally had the chance to do something that I have been wanting to do for a very long time – I switched to WordPress. My old OpenNTF Blogsphere based blog content can be accessed at http://oldblog.bruceelgort.com. Declan’s excellent Blogsphere template served me for 9 years and did an excellent job. Unfortunately I was unable to upgrade to newer versions of Blogsphere over the years due to the number of customizations I had made to the template.

Many thanks to Chris Martin and Aaron Hockley for their WordPress assistance.

XPagesWiki.com goes mobile

YouAtNotes Software has just released a mobile iOS client app for their popular XPagesWiki.com site. The app works on the iPhone and iPad and gives you access to all the great XPages community wiki articles. Not only does it give you native access to the articles but you also synchronize all of the data with the XPagesWiki.com site and stores it locally on your device. This gives you access to the content anytime you need it.

  

The app costs $4,99 and is well worth the money. Congratulations to Julian Buss and the YouAtNotes team on creating such a great app. The XPagesWiki.com app was built using Appcelerator.

Download XPagesWiki.com from the App Store >