Web 2.0 Apps Come Slowly Under Control of IT

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Marketing and sales have led in the development of Web. 2.0 apps, and continue to own them, according to a new report, which predicts IT will be the one holding the bag by the end of this year.

You would think that blogs, wikis and social networks launched by businesses to engage with customers in product and brand development scenarios would be commanded by IT people.

Not so, according to a "2008 Tribalization of Business Survey," conducted by Deloitte Services and released July 16. The survey, which included 140 various companies, found that 42 percent of the respondents granted the CMO (chief marketing officer) reign over these networks.

Thirty-nine percent of the companies that participated cited idea generation as the purpose of their blogs, wikis and social networks, while 19 percent said they leverage these tools to drive new product development. These are largely overseen by marketing managers.

"You actually have marketing now running value creation for things like product development and customer care," which from an organizational perspective is probably not optimal, Deloitte Services Director of Product Innovation Ed Moran told me.

Bye, GAby Menta

pdfzone

Home Mobile Reports of E-Book's Demise Still Premature


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Analysis: The market for e-books continues to grow slowly but surely.

Even though not everyone yet owns an Amazon Kindle or the whip-smart, PDF-savvy Sony Reader Digital Book, the e-book medium is alive and well.
Many "trade" e-books from large publishers originate from application files made in QuarkXPress or InDesign, converted via custom specs in Acrobat or other PDF authoring tools.

But with most of the world's published books marooned in paper format -- either created before the advent of desktop publishing or with the original PageMaker, Frame, or QuarkXPress files lost to fire, weather, or the sands of time -- paper-to-PDF that's also printable, searchable, and lightweight enough to be served on the web is still something of a technological holy grail.

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It involves more software trickeration than can be squeezed out of Acrobat, which often offers the "lightweight file, printable, browseable -- choose two" solution for long, scanned, image-heavy documents such as manuals, textbooks, illustrated histories or any of a number of other graphics-heavy volumes.

On that front, a sort-of new player, IoFlex, is getting attention right now thanks to several recent key deals and its bringing out from under wraps its long-in-development, enterprise-class content conversion and archiving tools that enable publishers to migrate content from paper to PDF.

Publishing consultant and frequent PDF conference presenter Michael Jahn says IoFlex -- a company he works with -- has been "flying below the radar" the last few years as the company gathered R&D data on improving its paper-to-PDF processing, especially on the graphics side.

Jahn doesn't think that e-book files, in the end, will grab the public's fancy the way the MP3 files have, courtesy of the iTunes/iPod combination. But electronic books and publications will eventually be the standard, just as the iPod is among MP3 players.

"At some point, it might be more legislative," Jahn says. "[Lawmakers] are going to say, 'Fifty cents for a newspaper? You guys are nuts, that ain't gonna cut it. It costs twice as much to recycle it. Sorry, we're not going to let you print newspapers.' Never mind global warming and carbon footprints. I just don't see sustainability when it comes to ink on paper."

IoFlex provides Acrobat plugins, applications, and servers to enable the creation of print-on-demand (POD) ready books for BiblioBazaar, a startup launched by the founders of the POD monolith BookSurge as their noncompete agreement expires with Amazon, which had purchased BookSurge in 2005. Other IoFlex customers include RRDonnelly, Integrated Book Technology, and LightningSource.

POD and e-books might seem to be completely separate animals, but in the end, they share a lot of the same stripes, at least when a book or document starts in paper form. Both need deskewing (making pages straight where a page scanned slightly off-kilter) and cleanup of noise and other junk that appears in the file as a byproduct of rapid scanning of thin paper. IoFlex's tools take on the task of deskewing and cleaning up pages automatically, recentering content as well as tuning up images for print or screen reading, according to the user's job specs.

Images in POD books, of course, need to be printable, and that's also the case for some e-books. On top of that, e-books produced from scans need optical character recognition (OCR), which, like basic deskewing, can be done in Acrobat and in less expensive off-the-shelf office suites from vendors such as ABBYY and Nuance.

Those products work for companies circulating internal documents electronically and building electronic archives of corporate knowledge. IoFlex, however, is aiming at commercial publishing clients who are building nimble content archives that can be output for print use or searchable on-screen browsing without losing the original scans, and with a minimum of intensive, page-by-page "by hand" cleanup and manipulation.

Saludos, GAby Menta

By Don Fluckinger

Adobe's PDF becomes ISO standard

Adobe Systems' popular portable document format, or PDF as it's more well-known, has become the latest International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standard as of Wednesday morning.

Adobe has been the key developer and patent holder of the technology, and on Wednesday passed over the entire specification of version 1.7 to the Geneva-based ISO. This comes just a year and a half after Adobe made plans to open up by giving the specification to the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) which was to lay the groundwork for ISO certification.

The ISO has issued a press release about the new standard (named "ISO 32000-1:2008"), along with a quote from Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch about the move expanding the PDF universe. "As governments and organizations increasingly request open formats, maintenance of the PDF specification by an external and participatory organization will help continue to drive innovation and expand the rich PDF ecosystem that has evolved over the past 15 years," Lynch said.

It's nearly verbatim with what he said back in the AIIM hand-off, but holds true to what typically happens when any file format is ISO certified. They'll typically become more attractive to governments and large corporate customers.

As for consumers, the PDF format has been a hit or miss affair on the Web. PDFs are well-known for taking a long time to open in browsers with Adobe's own Reader software. Others like Apple have come in and integrated PDF reading into its Safari browser, while users of Firefox have sought third-party solutions like Foxit to speed up the process. Likewise, PDF search results on Google have had an "open as HTML" option for some time now, letting users forgo formatting for speed.

Other recent file formats that received ISO certification include Microsoft's Office Open XML format, which passed a vote for approval back in April.

Bye bye GAby Menta

ISO approves PDF as an international standard

Move reflects a trend to standardize broadly adopted file formats to increase interoperability between different apps used to create business documents The International Organization for Standardization has approved Adobe Systems' widely used PDF (Portable Document Format) as an international standard, and is now in charge of any changes made to the specification.

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Sponsored by HP/Intel Related Stories Adobe works on Flash for iPhone, as Apple looks to Sprout Popular Tags pdf,, iso,, adobe, The format is open and accessible to anyone as ISO 32000-1, the standards body said Wednesday. The standard is based Adobe's version 1.7 of PDF.

PDF, the file format for Adobe's Acrobat software, has long been used as a standard way for people to exchange and view business documents. However, Adobe kept a proprietary hold on the format until it finally succumbed to industry pressure and submitted PDF for standardization in February 2007.

Adobe's move reflected an industrywide trend to standardize broadly adopted file formats to increase interoperability between different applications people use to create business documents. Microsoft submitted Office Open XML, a proprietary XML-based document format it built for its Office 2007 productivity suite, to the ISO. The ISO approved OOXML on April 1 in a controversial vote that is still being contested by some of the standards bodies that took part in it. Microsoft had also aimed to include PDF support in Office 2007 but revised that plan at the last minute over a squabble with Adobe. However, PDF support will be added to Office 2007 in a service pack from Microsoft expected to be released early next year. That update also will add support for Open Document Format for Office Applications (ODF), an XML-based file format that also is an ISO standard. ODF is a rival to OOXML; it became an international standard in May 2006.

Saludos, GAby Menta SAn Acrobat....