Some welcome news today, Google has decided to not support Internet Explorer 6 anymore with two of its core products, Google Docs and Sites (read about it on BBC news).

As Clarence mentioned in his blog, we have also taken the decision not to support IE6. We've found that IE6 (which is almost 10 years old now!) is too outdated to support all the latest advances in web application technology that SambaJAM provides. Instead of downgrading the experience for the end user for the sake of a dying browser, we decided to not support IE6. While on the general web this is an not an issue as many users have upgraded, as the BBC article highlights, there is still a large userbase of enterprise users who are forced to keep using IE6, and as an enterprise company this is something we are constantly aware of.

With Googles support, and increasing numbers of vendors deciding not to support IE6 anymore because of its limitations, we hope to see IE6 phased out sooner than Microsoft's 2014 end-of-support date. The web has moved on, and enterprises will come under increasing pressure to phase out IE6 if they wish to give the latest and greatest web applications like SambaJAM to their users.

Yesterday the big news was the UK economy grew a WHOLE 0.1% last quarter! This means the official end of the worst recession in peace time history, although there are many warnings that we're not completely out of the woods yet.

So does that mean we'll be returning to business as usual? Of course not! Recessions bring change, and while businesses will hopefully start to grow again, some long term trends have been accelerated by the recession and will start to become very obvious from 2010 onwards:

• Remote working - Offices have become increasingly mobile over the past decade, but with businesses looking to save operating costs on office space during the recession, even more businesses are starting to encourage home working for their staff. Forrester predicts that in the next 5 years, 43% of staff will be telecommuting regularly.
• Knowledge Management - With the number of layoffs we've had during this recession, a lot of businesses are starting to really appreciate the impact of lost knowledge after the staff walks out the door. You may be missing documents they created during their work, lost forever in their email inboxes or private folders/computers, or actual procedures and instructions that could have easily been captured in a wiki. Businesses will increasingly appreciate the value of the information and knowledge their staff have and look for tools and procedures to ensure they manage and retain this knowledge in the organisation.
• Doing more with less - Some companies have been hit hard by redundancies, and the remaining staff have found they have more work on their plate, which will only grow again as the economy recovers. Companies have needed to drive through productivity tools to enable a smaller workforce to do more. As the workload increases again, companies will look first to productivity improvements before hiring a large workforce again.
• Cutting back operating costs - One of the biggest winners during the recession was cloud computing. For those of you unfamiliar with cloud computing, essentially the software vendor provides the software over the internet for a monthly subscription. No more upfront capital costs to buy licenses and servers to run it, no need to hire specialist IT guys to keep the system running and backed up. The huge cost savings this allows have allowed some businesses to cut down their IT costs dramatically over the past year, and this is one of those trends where once you start, you don't go back! Expect more and more businesses to take advantage of cloud computing from now on.

We're entering a brave new world. Businesses will tread carefully towards recovery, but with a new appreciation of some of the trends that have appeared this decade. They will increasingly start to see how these trends can really help them save operating costs and help their workforce become more flexible and agile to respond to future opportunities and threats. Expect to see cloud computing vendors like SambaStream become more pervasive in the enterprise and enterprise collaboration tools like SambaJAM become a standard way of working and helping businesses manage their core asset - knowledge. We feel very confident as we enter the new economy, I hope you do too!

If you'd like to learn more about how SambaJAM can address the trends discussed in this blog for your business, please contact us here.

With the cold weather thawing now, the first few weeks of this month saw the UK snowed under for several days with up to 20% of the work force staying at home during the "snow days". The Centre for Economics and Business Research (cebr) predicted that this cost the British Economy approximately £900 million for each snow day we suffered.

The lost productivity from snow days leads to problems for both you and your staff:

• Drop in revenue - If you can't work or deliver services to your customers on snow days, you could stand to see your revenue drop significantly on those days
• Delayed payments - If your customers are also suffering from snow days, you could find payments from customers disrupted, and the interruption in your cash flow hitting your business
• Missed deadlines and targets - If your business is working to tight deadlines and targets, you could find snow days have a dramatic impact on your staff's productivity, meaning you have to adjust your original deadlines and targets further in the future. If you have service level agreements with customers, you could also find yourself hit with penalties if there is a significant slip in deadlines and targets.
• Increase in work backlog - With people ramping up to full speed after the Christmas holidays, we noticed that "business as usual" didn't start properly until this week of the (18th January onwards), a full 2 weeks after the new year! This was mainly due to the disruption of snow and now means staff and businesses find themselves with a much bigger backlog of work to catch-up after the Christmas holidays.

Unfortunately businesses can't control the weather, but what they can control is ensuring their staff has access to the information and tools they need to get on with their work regardless of where they're located.

With collaboration software like SambaJAM, staff can stay connected virtually over the web, without any loss of access to the key information and tools they use everyday in the office. For example:

• If you currently keep all your documents on your office desktops or shared network drives, most likely your staff will lose access to those outside the office. With web based collaboration software, not only can you ensure your staff still have access to the documents, you can also ensure they can search and edit documents easily. All they need is a web browser, and with online editing tools like Zoho, they don’t even need expensive Microsoft Office installed on their home PC or laptop to continue working.
• By using task management, you can still action and assign tasks to your team, even if you’re all sitting in different locations. This helps you keep things on track during the disruption.
• If you have all your information inside the collaboration platform, you can still search for the information and documents you need to complete your work without any disruption
• If you need your colleagues contact details, the profile pages can act as a replacement for your internal corporate directory, so staff can still get in touch with everyone from home
• You can use the social networking tools to keep your team connected and talking even if they’re sitting miles apart. They can post questions, ideas, issues as though its business as usual. Like a virtual office conversation on the web.

For your staff, the great thing about collaboration tools like SambaJAM, is if they use them day to day in the office, moving to another location will be seamless. All their information, documents and tools will still be there in the same place they left them, and as long as they have a browser to access them, you can ensure they don’t let the backlog of work after Christmas build up on snow days, making for a more relaxed return to work for both them and you.

If your business suffered as a result of the recent weather and you’d like to see how collaboration tools like SambaJAM can support remote working, please contact us here.

Wow. I have always wanted to have my Adam Garcia moment and be an Iron Man at the La Honda Institute like in the hilarious movie "The first $20 Million is always the hardest". Looks like the invention of the $99 computer is just around the corner. My dearest mother in-law, who I have just discovered is web 2.0, sent me a link to a very interesting talk by Pranav Mistry inventor of SixthSense. Watch the clip below to see the possibilities of Pranav's invention... uses a Sony type eyecam object recognition and a mini projector to turn your panaroma and any surface into an interactive environment, I am sure a hologram version is just around the corner. May be Amazon and Sony should pack up the ebook readers and come out with some headered paper instead for the SixthSense device. It gives a whole new meaning to OLED

The First $20 Million Is Always The Hardest

SixthSenses $300 Computer

We recently made an interim decision not to support the IE6 browser due to the gradual decline in browser usage and due to the many issues and limitations its rendering engine has in meeting latest HTML standards. SambaJAM will be launched on Google Chrome, FireFox, Safari and IE8 and will have support for IE7.

The latest news on the web is that the new Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 will not provide full support for IE6, Salesforce has announced future UI enhancements will not be supported on IE6, Google owned YouTube will be phasing out support for IE6, in addition Google have announced the beta launch of their Google Chrome IFrame,  to seemlessley replace the IE rendering engine on IE6, 7 and 8.

Understandably many organisations still use IE6 due to having internal applications built n tested to work with it. Migrating from IE6 can therefore be quite costly, the Google Chrome Frame looks to be an important option in reducing the burden of migrating completely away from the old browser.

We are following the progress of Google Chrome Iframe and will review our decision not to support IE6. Ultimately we will respond to our customers needs.

For those of you who have never ventured into web development or for those who would like a good reference for common issues surrounding the IE6 Browser, the following link provide useful information about common limitations: IE6 Common Issues

IE6 is like an old car that has come to the end of it's motoring days. Repairing its parts are no longer the cost effective option. It may be time to say thank you to IE6 for its years of service, but we now need more fuel efficient engines, inbuilt satnav, bluetooth handsfree kits, power assisted wheel breaking, automatic lights and seat warmers for more enjoyable and productive web travel.

Today Google announced their new Google Chrome OS here. This is a very interesting development and something many were predicting when Google launched Chrome last year.

For those of you who aren't one of the apparent 30 million users using Google Chrome, its a new web browser from Google. Why do we need another web browser when we already have Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari, Opera and a hundred other browsers? Well Google noticed that many web browsers just aren't designed for rich internet applications like we build in SambaStream. A lot of new applications are written in JavaScript and use AJAX technology, which makes for extremely user friendly user interfaces that look and feel like your local desktop applications, but don't require any installation (saving IT departments huge headaches when rolling out a new application across large organisations) and run anywhere simply through your web browser. The problem with current web browsers is they run JavaScript pretty slowly, and unfortunately if one JavaScript application crashes, it will crash your entire browser. They don't also provide all the capabilities required out of the box (although they're heading there) for offline browsing, and slim interfaces that don't interfere with the web application's interface and available space to display them.

So Google created a new open-source web browser called Chrome to address these issues. Because we build our own applications at SambaStream on Google Web Toolkit, which essentially allows us to provide rich and fast JavaScript/AJAX applications for users, Chrome is great! Not only do our applications run faster, we can (in future) make them work offline (useful if you're on an airplane and have no internet but still want to use your applications) and also if another application crashes (because ours would never do such a thing!) it won't shut down the whole web browser and lose all your work. It also allows us to provide simple desktop icons so you can launch and use our applications just as you would a normal desktop application.

This is the future of how applications will be delivered. Through a web browser, with no installation required, just sign-up and point your web browser to use it, and all your data will be securely stored, backed up and accessible anywhere in the world. Not only does it save money, it opens up the whole way we work allowing you to do so much more than you could on you current desktop.

However, even Chrome is just a web browser, and needs to be run on top of another operating system such as Windows, MacOS or Linux, so while you can use your web applications on your browser, you still have to switch back to your local desktop applications, look after your data and manage your local applications, upgrading and patching them regularly as new updates become available. Now Google has announced the beginning of a new class of operating system (OS) - essentially all the OS does is load the computer, the browser will now become your user interface on which you will run all your applications, browse the internet and communicate. And better yet its open-source (also known as free to the rest of us!)

So why is this such a big deal? As we're a business software organisation I want to give the example of what small and medium size businesses currently do (the potential benefits and cost savings are FAR greater for large global enterprises but I'll leave them out for now).

Imagine this - right now you buy pretty expensive PCs, you install them locally, buy some servers to run your email and other applications, put them somewhere secure in your office, hire an experienced IT guy to run and manage them if you can afford, or if you can't, hire an IT support firm that will come in to fix your PCs and servers if needed, and generally that's quite a lot of the time. The fact is your current PCs and Servers run very complicated operating systems and software (such as email servers for your email). Complication = Complexity = more chance of something going wrong. On top of that, you manage all your data locally, if you're not experienced enough, you may have a security hole you're not aware of, if you forget to backup you could lose all your data...the cost of managing your data properly is actually very expensive, and the more security and redundancy you have the more expensive it becomes.

Now imagine the future - you buy a very cheap "thin-client" PC, which essentially has a screen, a keyboard and some memory. You switch it on, instead of waiting a few minutes for your PC to start-up, it starts almost instantly, because the fact is the operating system does nothing more than start your web browser. Its light, simple and as a result less likely to crash and have problems. You've just saved a lot of support calls and money. Secondly, the server can now go, because all your applications such as email, Microsoft Office tools, accounting systems, CRM etc. are hosted securely by SaaS vendors like SambaStream. The vendor provides the online software through your web browser, looks and feels like a local desktop application, but because the vendor provides it as a service, they take care of all the security, data backups and updates to the system. You now don't need an IT guy to support it anymore.

This is the vision we have at SambaStream, to provide enterprise-class applications for organisations of all sizes that need little more than a web browser and a simple monthly subscription to run. One day businesses won't need to pay lots of money to setup their IT systems. Just pay a monthly subscription, and get support for each application from the experts, the people who actually built the application in the first place and will be able to fix it faster than an IT guy who has to manage several applications and probably isn't an expert in any of them.

I personally don't think Google Chrome OS will have a huge impact anytime soon, Windows has become an institution for many people and I believe many businesses will take time to change the current mindset to move away from their current applications and way of working, but its a start and I'm sure within the next decade we will see a significant shift towards the vision I described, in fact I bet our company on it!

I just realised I never followed up on our trip to the US so thought it was about time I rectified that. Well as I mentioned on our blog while we were out there, going to the US was eye opening. The approachability of people out there, and the insights and the way they operate, puts the UK Entrepreneurship scene to a lot of shame!

One example of how approachable US Entrepreneurs are compared to the UK, is Gist.com founder T.A. McCann. Two days before we were due to fly out to Seattle, Clarence sent me a link to their site to show an interview they did showing their product. I'd never heard of them, but I thought the product looked cool, and when we saw they were in Seattle we thought why not get in touch? Within 10 minutes of emailing them, T.A. had emailed us back and we had a meeting arranged for the following Monday.

And just in case you thought he had nothing better to do than meet start-ups he'd never heard of from the UK, when we turned up, he was in the middle of a team meeting and had just received $6.75mil. in VC funding a couple of weeks before! This is a busy guy, and we really appreciated him taking the time to meet up with us, talk about what we were doing and give us some extremely useful advice.

T.A. wasn't a one off on our trip either. People out there really appreciate the importance of openness, helping each other out with good advice, and its something dearly missing from the UK start-up scene. In later blogs I'll mention so of the other great people we met on our trip.

As for Gist.com, he signed us up for the private Beta they're running, and its Great! Now that I have to start the very nerve-racking task of cold calling companies to get our product out there, I've found Gist is the perfect tool to give you all the information you need to do that! Once you send someone an email, they automatically get put into your list of contacts and when you click on their name, it aggregates - automatically - all the information about them on the web such as their Twitter account, Google searches, websites...it does what I would have to manually take 30-60 minutes to do properly so I can at least know a little about who I'm calling before I pick up the phone.

Make sure you definitely check out Gist.com, its getting some great buzz and is a truley useful tool for anyone that lives by networking. Maybe T.A. founded Gist.com for that reason, he obviously believes in the power of making new connections and his tool is all about helping people do just that!

It's been some time, so I thought I would try and post another informative blog.

I thought my second blog would involve detailing the trouble points and steps involved in migrating between Gwt-Ext and GXT, however, it’s now been such a long time that I can no longer remember what the trouble points were except for a few:

This week myself, Ale and Clarence are in Seattle for the NetHope summit at the Microsoft Headquarters. Tomorrow we head to San Francisco to meet up with some entrepreneurs and other start-ups in our space to share our product, ideas and get feedback from some of the leaders in the SaaS/Collaboration space.

For those of you who have been following our blog, you may have wondered what happened to us. Well the short answer is nothing, we're still here, and still moving forwards at a fantastic pace!

Firstly, since we last posted a blog, you may have noticed our site has got a lot better looking and finally has some details on what we're planning to launch later this summer, SambaJam.

SambaJam is a product of all the knowledge and experience we've accumulated working with big and small clients who are itching for web 2.0 collaboration in their organisations, but struggling to find a complete solution that fits their needs. Well SambaJam is quite literally going to be the most advanced collaboration platform out there when we finally launch our Beta later this summer, and because we've built it with businesses and large organisations in mind, it will fit into any small or large organisation simply and securely. Watch this space for more info on what SambaJam will be, and make sure you sign up for our private beta (see form left) today so we can invite you to get a first look at SambaJam and most importantly get your key feedback in before the final version.

Secondly, we have just bought on another member to our team, Mathieu, a very competent and enthusiastic developer from France. He will be a great help to getting SambaJam completed with all the extra features and ideas we keep coming up with during the development. More from him soon...

So rest assured, we're still here and we're more alive than ever! Over the next few months we'll be visiting the US for a trip to the valley, getting SambaJam launched and hopefully with your support, show the world how online collaboration should be done!