Inspirational Technology

Grid7 Venturecast #12 with the founders of LeadBot is now online.

The three original founders of Leadbot.com (Bill Ramsey, Rob McAleer and Ben Wagner) share their experience of building an online brokerage for quality financial services leads. From a grim morning of a catastrophic data loss where they were forced to serve their web site off of a laptop to a record-breaking seven-figure year of revenues for ‘06, Leadbot is a come-back story of a startup business that has overcome adversity and firmly established itself as a reputable company with loyal customers. Their core belief: for even most tech-oriented businesses, the success factor comes down to the focus on the human elements and the relationships you build with your customers.

I think this was a pretty good conversation with some real “in the trenches” entrepreneurial experiences being shared.

Wow, I never thought it would happen but XQuery 1.0, XSL-T 2.0 and XPath 2.0 have finally been released as W3C recoommendations. Eight specs in total make up this behemoth. This is an interesting claim.

The XML Query Working Group catalogued over forty implementations of XQuery and reported on how fourteen of them satisfy a test suite consisting of more than 14,000 test cases, demonstrating unprecedented levels of interoperability. XML Query is already available in products from all of the major relational database vendors as well as in XML-native database systems, middleware, XML editing systems and numerous open source products. W3C Member organizations have also announced implementations of XQuery or plans for implementations.

Just shows that with a enough blood, sweat and tears anything can be pushed through a standards body. So does anyone other than vendors actually care anymore? The wait for these things was excruciating and the complexity that comes along with them is extremely unfortunate. XML was supposed to be simple, this stuff plain and simply isn’t.

At JumpBox we have released an update to the vTiger CRM JumpBox and added a new PunBB discussion forums JumpBox. At this time these appliances are suitable for evaluation and testing. With this release we also launched a new web site.

The goal of a JumpBox is to make the installation and maintenance of complex server based software drop dead simple. They bundle the operating system, application and all application dependencies together into a single bundle that is deployed using virtualization software like Parallels or VMWare. This allows the entire software stack to be up and running in about one minute. There’s no easier way to deploy server based software and with the upcoming JumpBox assurance program, there will be no easier way to get support and maintenance for that software.

JumpBox is also looking to collect more feedback on these appliances and virtual appliances in general through the JumpBox forums.

The latest installment of the Grid7 Venturecast is now online. This installment features inventor Lon Safko.

Lon Safko is the godfather of the Assistive Speech Technology Industry having invented the technology that became the Dragon Naturally Speaking product. Eighteen of Lon’s inventions were recently inducted into the Smithsonian alongside thinkers such as Darwin, Wyeth and Edison for having made the most significant contribution this century to the human-computer interface.

Lon is an interesting guy and recently had some of his inventions added to the Smithsonian.