The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Brobdingnagian Bards doing "Wild Mountain Thyme," a song we have about a dozen versions of here on iTunes, and which we put on as a playlist. Not too many songs you can do that with:

Astoria Software has announced the September 2009 release of Astoria On-Demand, a tool for managing XML content across the enterprise, pretty much on schedule with the company's every three to four month upgrade release.  

Michael Rosinski, President and Chief Executive Officer of Astoria, said the September 2009 release "establishes a new standard for high performance XML component management." 

 

The marketing point for San Francisco-based Astoria is that it's supposed to help "drive efficiencies in dynamic product documentation with on-demand delivery of structured content management," according to company officials, who add that Astoria On-Demand "reduces documentation costs up to 90 percent and compresses product launch cycles from months to weeks."

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Houston-based TRACLabs, vendors of robotics and automation, were recently awarded an $850,000 software development grant from the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The company's proposal, "Building a Coherent World View from Sensory Data," focuses on "creating software that can integrate data from a wide variety of video, infrared, range and other sources to improve the performance of robotic search and recovery," with the goal of saving more soldiers' lives, according to TRACLabs officials.

 

"Imagine a situation where a unit wants to see if chemical or radioactive weapons have been deployed in a building before they enter," says David Kortekamp, President and CEO of TRACLabs. "Our software will enable a robot to quickly and accurately assess the situation without putting troops at risk of exposure."

Robots and unmanned air and ground vehicles form an increasingly large segment of the U.S. military's surveillance and security assets. Currently, there are as many as 4,000 robots and unmanned air and ground vehicles deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

 

One problem arising from all this, of course, is how to integrate the information from each to form a comprehensive picture of what is happening on the ground. TRACLabs officials say they'll develop software that "merges that data into a single stream," and improve robotic recognition of static objects, such as bomb components, and "help robots better manipulate their environments."

 

This will include tasks as diverse as opening doors and drawers to determining a search pattern that will ensure that every square inch of territory has been investigated. In the second stage, the focus will shift to searching for objects that are able to move, from mobile weapon units to human targets.

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Horizon Data Center Solutions, a disaster recovery services vendor, has launched a cloud computing product, FlexSafe Cloud.

 

Company officials characterize it as a "private approach to cloud computing" being marketed on its "flexibility, scalability and cost savings of virtualization" merits. They see it as a way to fill what they perceive to be a gap in the marketplace by providing IT outsourcing options equally attractive to enterprise and small and medium sized business clients. 

 

Chuck Smith, Executive Vice President with Horizon and the company's Chief Marketing Officer, notes the while the industry continues to "debate the actual definition of cloud computing," Horizon has adopted the National Institute of Standards and Technology working definition, with "its key characteristics of on-demand self-service, ubiquitous network access, ability to rapidly scale resources and pay on a measured-usage basis."

He noted that Horizon's decision to adopt the NIST definition was helped along by "our growing list of federal clients," adding that "we believe that the large public cloud providers like Amazon and Google have done an excellent job of supporting the testing and development world, so there's no need for us to pursue the public cloud." 

FlexSafe Cloud is based upon Horizon's Infrastructure as a Service offering, built on providers like Above Net, Cisco, F5 Networks and HP. The FlexSafe Cloud service is virtualized using VMware, and currently has two Dallas-Ft. Worth area data centers.

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Fairfax, Virginia-based Datatel has introduced Datatel Recruiter for the higher education constituent relationship management market, which company officials describe as "the latest addition to the company's Enterprise CRM" product.

 

"Let's face it, customer service doesn't stop once a student enrolls," said Datatel Chief Client Officer Liz Murphy. "CRM is a strategy to improve customer satisfaction enterprise-wide. It starts the moment a student visits your Web site and continues."

Nicole Engelbert, Lead Analyst of Vertical Markets Technology at the Datamonitor Group, and author of the study "CRM in the Higher Education Market," noted recently that "CRM is becoming an important investment for higher education institutions." 

The reasons for that, Engelbert said, are that an enterprise-class CRM "helps to bring together data from three areas: recruitment, retention, and development. Right now, however, the economic downturn is prompting many institutions to focus CRM on recruitment activities in order to manage the influx of applications."

The Datatel Enterprise CRM is geared to track people "from suspect to alumni," according to a particularly felicitous turn of phrase from a Datatel official, who said the product incorporates consulting services and tools such as "true integration with the database of record, reporting and analytics" and dynamic vertical workflows.

 

Datatel has focused exclusively on higher education since 1979.
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IPass has launched iPassConnect Client for BlackBerry a global enterprise Wi-Fi client for the BlackBerry platform.

 

IPass supports such smartphones as the iPhone, Windows Mobile and Symbian-based smartphones. Now iPass Mobile Office corporate customers "can provide their employees with access to nearly 140,000 hotspots in 83 countries," company officials say. 

 

Despite 3G connectivity on many devices, "the advanced applications currently in use from vendors such as Oracle, Siebel, Salesforce.com and Microsoft demand the wider bandwidth associated with Wi-Fi for fuller functionality and greater usability," iPass officials say.

 

With access to what company officials claim is "the world's largest Wi-Fi hotspot network," enterprises can "avoid expensive roaming charges" and get "predictable and transparent" monthly mobility costs. 

 

They're certainly riding a growing market. This year noted tech research firm Gartner said the global smartphone market is growing by 27 percent year-on-year to 40.9 million units.

 

And hey: It'll be huge in Belgium. "Independent research conducted with 300 Belgian companies showed that while laptops remain the most used device for Internet access abroad, BlackBerry ranked top in the smartphone category with 59 percent," said Steven Van den Neucker, Director Mobile Telenet Solutions. "Now that iPass is offering support for BlackBerry smartphones, we can satisfy this demand and provide a global Wi-Fi connectivity service for these users." 

 

IPass is available for all current and future Wi-Fi-enabled BlackBerry smartphones. And as part of the iPass Mobile Office service "there are no additional contracts to sign, start-up fees to pay, or credentials to manage," company officials say.

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GestureTek, a vendor of gesture control interfaces for interactive displays and devices, has announced that its patented EyeMobile optical tracking software will be used in Sony Ericsson's new Yari mobile phone.

EyeMobile is available on over 100 million mobile devices, enabling motion-control game play on mobile phones. Many titles have already added advanced gesture recognition. Click the link above for a demo.

Requiring a small processor footprint, EyeMobile is added onto existing handsets and applications. An upgraded Java-based mobile sensor API lets developers create motion control games or applications for camera-enabled handsets.

 

Francis MacDougall, GestureTek's Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, remarked that EyeMobile doesn't have "the cost of hardware-based touch screen systems." 

Using the mobile device's camera, EyeMobile measures the movement of the phone, or the user, from one camera frame to the next, allowing for a "joystick", "force of motion", "menu selection" or "point to control" style of interaction.

 

"Users can do anything on their mobile device without touching buttons or the screen -- menu selection, scrolling, panning, zooming, shuffling playlists and turning pages," company officials say, adding that other applications that can be made gestural include Web browsing, image view, map navigation and text messaging.

Handsets embedded with EyeMobile include the DoCoMo 904i, 905i, 906i and 706i series, with models from Sharp, NEC, Fujitsu, Panasonic and Sony Ericsson, and the F305 handset. EyeMobile is also accessible for all post-2006 camera phones supporting the Brew, Symbian and Windows Mobile platforms.