This is real fun. Tweetshell, an online shell interface for twitter:

tweet_shell@twitter.com:~> wall You know, in linux they say everything is a file. In TweetShell everything is a tweet!!
[The idea is to use your everyday linux commands to interact with twitter. In the previous line we are using the "wall" command to post a new tweet.]

http://www.tweetsh.com/

eyeDesigner is the graphical interface builder for eyeOS, the Cloud Computing Operating System.

Microsoft Corporations’s Steve Ballmer was announced as the Cannes 2009 media person of the year in advertising. Together with its prestigious movie festival Cannes is also known as the Mekka of commercial advertisement. Over 28,000 ads from all over the world are showcased and judged at the Festival. Winning companies receive the highly coveted Lion trophy, honouring the most creative TV/cinema, print, outdoor, interactive, radio, design, sales promotion, integrated advertising, as well as the best media and direct marketing solutions.

The Media Person the Year award pays tribute to a prominent personality who is an influential figure in the development of today’s media landscape, which ultimately plays an integral part in shaping the future of the advertising industry.

Sure, the award reflects the great public attention Microsoft received with its viral marketing star Ballmer and the Seinfeld-Gates advertisement campaign. The Seinfeld-Gates advertisement series used the trick of confusion to let customers speak up with their appreciation of the Microsoft products and services. What came out of it was the “I’m a PC” campaign which takes on the operating system competitor Apple and it seeks to improve brand profile by a focus on core messages.

Microsoft also follows Google and Yahoo as a business which creates a way to profit from internet search, currently being number three. As the application sphere moves towards the cloud and advertisement budgets are cut, the competition becomes even more fierce.

I nominated Co-Ment for the Sourceforge award.

Cloud won’t become standard, says Kaspersky

VMworld : A Virtualization conference in Cannes 24-26 February

In the European Parliament many languages are in use, this is French, Pascal Paridans from the IT services explains that the Parliament is working to make its procedures ODF conformant, to accept documents encoded in this ISO standard format for document exchange.

Concernant la soumission de document ODF par nos députés. Le Parlement européen a toujours choisi une approche pragmatique qui consiste à toujours privilégier la satisfaction des besoins métiers. Il y a peu nous avons été contacté par M. Cappato [an Italian ALDE member of Parliament], pour permettre la soumission de document au format ODF. Nous devons reconnaître que lorsque M. Cappato nous a contacté, la configuration standard sous tendant les applications de la plénière, ne permettait pas d’accepter des formats du type ODF.
Cette difficulté est à présent levée et tout député qui souhaite soumettre un document en format ODF peut le faire.

Pour être complet sur ce domaine. Il est vrai que des améliorations sont encore à prévoir notamment afin de permettre aux députés de communiquer en format ODF aussi bien à la réception qu’à l’expédition vers les citoyens européens.

Nous avons conscience de ce besoin. Nous allons donc inscrire la validation et la mise en production d’une solution permettant le traitement des fichiers ODF au niveau du poste de travail standard des députés. Ceci leur permettra de communiquer plus librement avec les citoyens européens et sur base de standards ouverts.

Adobe opens its Flash streaming protocol RTMP as part of its open screen initiative. The move to open RTMP comes as competition with the Microsoft alternative Silverlight heatens up. Adobe currently dominates the field of streaming with its Flash technology, used by video portals such as Youtube. But competitor Microsoft recently won showcases as the Olympics and the Obama inauguration for its Silverlight technology with strong .NET integration. Other beneficiaries of the competition include the users on other operating systems. Microsoft sponsors via Novell the Moonlight project for an implementation of Silverlight for Novell’s SuSe Linux operating system. Flash is reimplemented via the ambitious Gnash free software project and Adobe updated its own binary plugins for Linux. Enthusiasts of world wide web technology advocate the future was html5 instead of both offerings. Streaming technology is a patent minefield, so little can be told about the openness of the specifications.

The European Commission has updated the European Union Public License (EUPL): Seven clarifications were made that did not attempt to change the original meaning. The EUPL 1.1 is made available in all official languages of the European Union and the originators ensure that is is compatible with national copyright laws in all member states. The EUPL thus reaches a maturity other licences cannot provide and – unlike the GNU General Public License – it stays politically neutral and does not dillute the ownership attribution for your work.

For software developers, in particular from the public sector, the EUPL should be considered when you start new openly licensed software projects.

Recently Microsoft has released an update to the Azure SDK. Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, run-time, and control environment for the Azure Services Platform.

A sponsored paper of David Chappell explains the Azure plattform: Azure is depicted as a bundle of .Net, Live and SQL services.

In other words Azure uses an existing software stack bottom-up and packages it for a cloud strategy. My open question is how that Azure strategy would actually translate into downstream innovation and repositioning.