I just wanted to wish everybody a happy and safe July 4th. WAVE is taking the day off tomorrow, but we will be back on Monday.

Have a DAM good weekend.

To all of our friends and customers up in there in the “Great White North,” happy Canada Day!

Take advantage of a rare opportunity to personally see an Olympic weightlifter in action! Zach Schluender is a world-class weightlifter who placed 19th in the 2007 World Championship and recently competed in the 2008 Pan American Championships. This member of the United States Olympic Team will be demonstrating the results of true power by lifting 200 kilograms over his head.

The ACCM conference is just around the corner. We will be exhibiting our unique culture and solutions in booth #532. Stop by and say hi!

WAVE’s partner CMI: Canada will be speaking at the upcoming Henry Stewart DAM Symposium in New York.

The presentation is titled “Beyond Images: Leveraging Content Management for Improved Efficiencies and New Revenue Streams”.

Here is a short blurb describing the presentation:

Digital asset and content management solutions have often been viewed solely as a means of managing content. Providers of these solutions frequently have difficulty charging incremental fees for content services, bundling them in with design, printing or other aspects of their businesses. But in today’s fast-paced digital world of publishing, content management solutions can play a new and unique role as the hub of a production operation, linking image repositories, textual content, pricing and other metadata into an integrated workflow between content owners and production houses. During this session, you will hear how an enterprising Canadian service provider has taken content management services to a new level in support of its retail customer base, resulting in amazing workflow efficiencies and significant incremental revenue streams–a win/win proposition for the company and its customers.

For more information, please see the full conference program.

Also, don’t forget to stop by and visit us at the WAVE booth!

MediaBank 3.5 Significant Feature List includes….

LDAP Support
MediaBank will now be able to authenticate Users and Groups via LDAP/Active Directory. User Accounts password and enabled status will also be adhered to. MediaBank can also be configured to allow a “fall-through” to its own internal authentication for external positioned users (i.e. Web access).

Multi-Media Support
MediaBank will now support multi-media file types (AVI, WMV, MOV, MPG, etc…) and generate multi-page thumbnails and normalized flash preview of the assets. Streaming will be available via all 3 MediaBank client interfaces - Native Client, Java Web and MB Web.

Projects
MediaBank will now support unlimited Projects - both static and dynamic. Projects will be permission based and can be managed remotely by Project administrators. Projects can also be configured to be “role” based (i.e. dynamic/query based - Enterprise Only) and are relative with respect to User, Group, Time, Date and Database.

MB Web
MediaBank Perl/cgi Web interface will have a new updated, progressive Web 2.x look and feel. Its core structure is completely redesigned to allow easy User Interface editing and configuration by abstracting away the User Interface from the core code. Thus, upgrading and bug fixes will be easier to implement along with configuration, brandings and customizations.

License Manager
MediaBank will now support its own License Manager. This will enable fail-over models and provide a more robust and accurate licensing scheme for Test Servers and Fail-Over Servers.

Web Services for MB SDK
MediaBank’s entire Java SDK will now be available via Web Services also.
(more…)

The Aberdeen Group has just released a report titled Marketing Digital Asset Management: Capturing, Storing, and Retrieving Digital Media to Deliver Strategic Value. The report discusses the use of Marketing DAM systems among 185 Best-in-Class companies.

Report Description from Aberdeen:

A December 2007 survey of 185 companies revealed how Best-in-Class companies maximize the strategic value of digital assets through technology and organization capabilities. For the purpose of this research, Digital Asset Management (DAM) is viewed as a subset of Enterprise Content Management (ECM). The research focuses on technologies that allow marketing departments to capture, store, retrieve, and manage digital content. This benchmark enables companies to see how Best-in-Class tactics help marketing departments maximize investments and leverage technology to improve brand effectiveness, brand consistency, and return on marketing investments, ultimately delivering strategic value from marketing asset management technologies.

Here are a few snippets:

Best-in-Class report a 300% higher return on marketing investment than their peers and a 275% higher customer satisfaction rate.

Best-in-Class companies saved 292% more than peers on the cost of content production.

Thanks to WAVE’s sponsorship, you can download the report for FREE through the Aberdeen Group.

WAVE is featured in the February 2008 Henry Stewart newsletter. Along with the WAVE feature, the newsletter Michael Moon also discusses the new generation of DAM, Gary Katz reveals a Marketing Operations benchmark study, and there are also summaries from the latest Journal of Digital Asset Management.

There is a ton of information packed in this newsletter, and it is definitley worth checking out.

InfoTrends has just released a whitepaper detailing a “phased” DAM implementation. The whitepaper examines the advantages of basing the system on your most urgent requirements, and then growing the system to meet you future needs. Also, using references from WAVE, they provide a sample strategy for phased implimentation provided.

“Most organizations are overwhelmed when they first consider DAM, especially when considering where to start. Do you implement a “point” solution for specific departments (marketing) or specific publishing processes (print production)? Is it necessary to develop an extensive (and expensive) content, process / workflow and metadata blueprint prior to deployment? More generally perhaps, what vendor selection and implementation strategies can deliver fast and significant returns without hindering future development opportunities?”

“Consider service-oriented architectures (SOA) in which IT systems and applications expose and share content, data, and services. Standard protocols such as SOAP and JMS (Java) provide the necessary communications between systems. Leveraging standard protocols such as these ensures the long-term viability and scalability of a DAM solution. Organizations can address the most compelling DAM requirements first – basic object management – and expand a solution as user adoption builds and more complex DAM-based applications can be developed.”

Read the rest of InfoTrend’s A Phased DAM Approach Whitepaper.

Microsoft made an offer to buy Yahoo! for $44.6 Billion is cash and stocks. It looks to me like Microsoft want to overthrow Google, and once again become the reigning “King of Silicon Valley”.

As of the announcement, Yahoo! stock has risen %60 in pre-market trading.

Link to Reuters

Link to CNN Money

UPDATE 02/11/08:  Yahoo! has rejected Microsoft’s $44.6 Billion bid. In a formal announcement, Yahoo! said Microsoft “substantially undervalues” them.

But Yahoo! also said, they might be willing to reconsider if Microsoft offered a high ammount.

Link to story 

On Wednesday January 16th Sun Microsystems announced that it had agreed to acquire the extremely popular open-source database developer (and the “M” in LAMP) MySQL AB. The $1 Billion deal consists of $800 Million in cash and $200 Million in options.

With this acquisition, along with the open releases of Solaris and Java, it seems as if Sun is ramping up their open-source strategy.

But despite reassurances from all sides that this will not affect the set of languages/platforms or the ideals of MySQL, the reaction to this news has been mixed. While many people are excited about the possibilities, others are worried about LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) becoming SAMP (with “S” standing for Solaris). Only time will tell.

This news comes almost 2 years after Oracle tried - and failed - to acquire MySQL in 2006. (In related news Oracle has recently acquired BEA Systems).

Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and President of Sun, answers more questions here.

Kaj Arno, MySQL VP of Community Relations, explains what this means for MySQL.