Stories by Howard Wen

5 free project management applications you must try

Project management applications are usually centered around Gantt charts, where each step in a project is represented as a bar in the chart. These visuals are linked to lists of the resources tied to each task

Free tools for teleconferencing with a 'virtual presence'

Using teleconferencing technology has lately become an obvious and financially practical choice to offset rising business travel expenses. Yet sometimes simple chatting doesn't cut it. There has been growing interest in the notion of online conferencing with a "virtual presence" emphasis, which enables people to share information and their very selves with one another with a stronger sense of near-tangible "face time."

Six factors that will decide the fate of Silverlight

Since the public release of its earliest version last year, Silverlight has been touted as Microsoft's Flash killer. This relatively new Web development platform aims to challenge Adobe's venerable Flash (and associated Flex development tools) in the online multimedia space.

The open life of Second Life

On January 2007, the source code of the client viewer for the online virtual world community Second Life was released as Open Source. It was seen in some circles in the Second Life community as questionable, raising concerns about security and speculation as to why Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, would do such a thing. The popularity of, and media hype for, their virtual real world was huge at the time. So why did the company feel the need to do it?

Why major mobile handset makers are riding with LiMo

The LiMo Foundation was formed on January 2007 as a consortium of mobile industry companies joining together to create for handsets an open and standardized software platform based on Linux. Their goal is to deliver an open handset format that will become more widely accepted and used over closed, proprietary platforms. The foundation's major founders include Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic Mobile Communications, Samsung Electronics and Vodafone. These companies and other members share leadership and decision making.

Born from Firefox

They are four applications designed to serve different purposes: A web browser, a music player and organizer, another that does the same for video, and a word processor for screenwriters. Yet they share one thing in common: All were built with a Mozilla-based toolkit, either the Gecko Runtime Environment or its successor, XULRunner. Both toolkits use the same codebase which runs Firefox.

Big mods for the small Eee PC

During the 2007 holiday season, there was another small, white and cheap tech device that became a hard-to-find bestseller: the ultra-portable Eee PC notebook by ASUS. (It also comes in black and three other colors, but the white model appears to be the most popular.) Despite looking like a toy, the Eee PC is a fully capable computer primarily meant for wireless Internet use. It runs Linux and includes Firefox and OpenOffice.

A second life for 'Second Life' with open source?

Until recently, the business news media fawned over the Second Life online virtual world. Stories fixated on Second Life "residents" who got rich brokering virtual real estate, or on the numerous corporations and consumer brands rushing to claim their presence within it (by building virtual kiosk centers or "islands"). Virtual world hype trumps open source hype, so little virtual ink has gone into discussing the open source initiative that Linden Lab, the company behind the virtual world, established to further its development.

Five tips for making a popular Facebook app

Ever since the social networking site of Facebook opened itself up to outside development, there has been a flurry of Facebook applications created by independent programmers and companies.

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