Welcome [to Optaros Labs]
Welcome to Optaros Labs!
This site is a place where we will be publishing updates on some of the research and development going on within Optaros: trends we’re tracking, new technologies, standards, and open source projects we’re creating prototypes and proofs of concept with, and ultimately new concepts and services we think will be of interest to our client base.
“As I’ve said many times, the future is already here. It’s just not very evenly distributed.” – William Gibson
One of the joys and challenges of Optaros Labs is that the kinds of things we’re looking at change constantly, as new technologies, standards, and approaches get introduced all the time. New ideas come to us from Optaros employees, from clients and prospects, from open source projects, and from our own interactions with /on the Internet.
Look for additional prototypes, demos, and proofs of concept to be posted here as new projects get completed.
Meanwhile, here’s a series of short blurbs on six issues we’re currently exploring:
Microblogging: What is the impact of microblogging on the kinds of user-generated content our clients are interested in and investing in? How does the conversation
change as a result of many, small, discontinous conversations being carried on in parallel? How would a media company leverage microblogging to understand, participate in, or even shape a conversation?
Social Graph & Data Portability: The “social graph” represents all your relationships to other users. Much attention is currently being generated around the notion of “Social Graph Portability” which would enable you to take your set of friend relationships and carry it from one network to another.
Mobile Applications & Interactivity: One thread of the next generation internet discussion has always been about other computing devices – laptops, ultra portables, mobile phones, set top boxes, kiosks, etc. Traditional mobile app development has meant trying to get “on deck” – distributed with the phones from major carriers. Increasingly, though, there are other ways to get application interactivity onto phones.
Assisted Metadata Capture for User Generated Content: Content Management Systems often focus on metadata – the “data about the data” such as who posted it, when, in what system, where it was edited, what it is associated with, etc. But user generated content systems have so far been pretty weak at handling rich metadata. Some evolving approaches exist which attempt to leverage known context to create richer metadata on user generated content.
Syndicated Interactivity: Widgets offer ways to syndicate content from one application into another context – whether that context is a blog sidebar, a desktop dashboard, a portlet, or a sidebar in Vista. But widgets have generally been one way – spraying content out but offering little in the way of direct interaction. What happens when widgets bring transactional interaction to you? We’re just starting to see interactivity pushed to the edge – most widgets are still “copies” of content for distribution not “windows” into live applications.
Blurring Browser/Desktop Line: Many have talked about making Web applications more desktop like. Well, now they sometimes are desktop applications. The difference between a “mostly web application that has a little bit of installed code on the desktop” and a “mostly desktop app that gets all its data from the web” has long been slim but gets weaker all the time, to the point where it may be difficult to determine whether a given application is a web app or a desktop app.
Tags: experiment, innovation, Labs, open source
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