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…)

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.

We all know there are many Content and Asset Management systems out there, and many times they have similar features. But how do you decide who is the best for your company? The answer is to use a scenario based approach. Knowing what you want and need out of a solution will help immensely.

Over at IntelligentEnterprise, Tony Byrne has written an article detailing this scenario based approach:

The lines between all content technology families are notoriously blurry. This is especially true of portals, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems and Web Content Management (WCM) system, where there’s lots of overlap in vendors, product functionality, and marketing messages. For example, if you’re looking to implement Intranet-based document management, you could conceivably use any of these three types of products. Yet some consultancies will try to sell you all three types of solutions, with an obligatory (and expensive) integration project.

Take a scenario-based approach that solves your most pressing needs first. ECM, WCM and portals fill fairly specific roles and tend to address different problems. By understanding what you’re trying to accomplish, you can better identify the technologies you do and don’t need

……And what exactly, you might ask, is the difference among “Global Intranet” (WCM), “Enterprise Intranet” (Portal) or “Enterprise Web Publishing” (ECM)? Quite possibly very little. On the other hand, you should know that the tools approach the problem in different ways. The WCM solution will likely emphasize semi-structured content and documents with employee-friendly editorial interfaces. The intranet portal will bring a functional focus to interactive applications (such as a people-finder portlet). The ECM product will likely provide native hooks from the intranet into its own document and records management repositories. Ironically, CMS Watch research suggests that “enterprise-tier” vendors do a comparatively poor job at the kind of multi-Web-site management scenarios you see in large enterprises.

With the heightened awareness of piracy and copyright infringement on the web, it is becoming increasingly important for companies to track use and distribution of their licensed content through Digital Rights Management (DRM).

When online .mp3s and .movs started to replace CDs and DVDs, the public’s awareness of DRM increased. That awareness, combined with a few high-profile follies, like Sony’s “rootkit-DRM” a few years ago, caused consumers to rally against the DRM movement. Now, with high-profile announcements like “DRM-Free mp3s on iTunes,” DRM seems to be struggling once again in the digital music industry.

But what is the current state and future of DRM in the publishing industry? Surely, our content and the content of our customers’ is vital to our business and in some instances a critical revenue stream. It prevents assets from being used inappropriately or without permission. Is DRM within the publishing industry fundamentally different than within the music industry? What impact does DRM have on the usability of assets? What do you think of DRM in general, do you use it in your organization?

Looks like within the next couple of years, the industry will have access to 4 terabyte hard drives. The article below suggests that this could be possible by 2011.

Hitachi Ltd. says its researchers have successfully shrunken a key component in hard drives to a nanoscale that will pave the way for quadrupling today’s storage limits to 4 terabytes for desktop computers and 1 terabyte on laptops in 2011….
The feat, which Hitachi plans to present Monday at the Perpendicular Magnetic Recording Conference in Tokyo, revisits a technology known as giant magnetoresistance, or GMR, that was the basis of the work of two European scientists who won the Nobel Prize in physics last week….
“We changed the direction of the current and adjusted the materials to get good properties,” said John Best, chief technologist for Hitachi’s data-storage unit.
By doing so, Hitachi said it has created the world’s smallest disk drive heads in the 30-nanometer to 50-nanometer range, or about 2,000 times smaller than the width of an average human hair.
Other hard drive companies are working on similar technology as well, Rydning said. He predicted the entire disk drive industry will begin migrating to this new type of GMR-based technology in 2009.

Read the rest of the article over at MSNBC.com

Within the foreseeable future, users workstation will be able to house terabytes of data. How will company’s adapt? Will there users even need all this space considering most corporate data resides on remote storage servers? Organizing, searching, finding, rights management, availability, how will workflows be affected with all this data sitting out there? The next few years should be interesting with the storage needs and disk space availability increasing at such a rapid pace. Filtering through all this data will become increasingly dependant on how its organized and managed.

OSX 10.0 was first released in March, 2001 and in the last 5 years it has had 5 major releases and 40+ minor releases. For an Operating System, the frequency of releases is somewhat disturbing when it comes to reliability and consistency. How does this effect you?

When you think of having your ECM or DAM system support streaming of multi-media assets. Are you thinking that you want the originals streamed? If so, why? How would you solve the various players, platforms, and media types that are available? Which ones do you like best?