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September 2006

Posted on September 15, 2006 by Chris LoSacco

An Experiment with Rivers

Arc90 has a new experiment in the lab called the Arc90 River Reader. It's an extension of the simple rivers that are popping up on the 'net for news sources, except it accepts any RSS feed, and therefore has some slick usages. Read about it, then play with it, and we think you'll be impressed. I've already bookmarked it on my Treo, and you might, too.

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Posted on September 11, 2006 by Richard Ziade

Let'em Play

As people are starting to think about how the 2.0 world can be applied to the Enterprise (call it "Office 2.0" or "Enterprise 2.0"), there's a really important and not-so-obvious lesson to be learned from all the mashing going on in the Web 2.0 world.

All these cool creative composite applications like Housingmaps.com are not a byproduct of a sudden surge in creative thinking and uses. There's a critical pre-requisite that's been put in place: systems are opening up.

Paul Rademacher was selected as one of Technology Review's 35 young innovators. On his own, he merged together Craig's LIst & Housing Maps to create housingmaps.com. It's a great example of the "happy accidents" that can result from systems opening up and simplifying how people can tap into the power of a service. From the Tech Review profile:

For Rademacher, there's a moral to the story. Innovation is possible only when companies let you tinker with their creations. Too many good ideas are squandered, he says, because the tools needed to realize them are locked away.

At Arc90, we're building some complex systems and one thing we'll openly admit is that we can't foresee every every possible way a service can be leveraged in the future. So we hedge our bets by delivering these servics in a easy-to-understand, simple way. We're already seeing the fruits of this approach. When the time comes to start tying systems together (and it inevitably does) the heavy lifting typically associated with integration isn't so heavy. In fact, in many cases it's downright easy.

So within your organization, open up first and build your applications upon that open framework of services. It may be slightly more painful now, but you'll undoubtedly reap the rewards later.

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Posted on September 11, 2006 by Chris LoSacco

Introducing : Alternating Rows

The Arc90 lab just got its fifth tool, Alternating Rows, a great script that takes plain table data and makes it much more readable. Just feed your table tag a couple of colors and let the tool do the rest.

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