This is a checklist of items you need for an all-encompassing personal branding strategy. Personal branding is the process of marketing and selling yourself as a brand in order to gain success in business. Personal branding is a continual process just as knowing yourself is a continual process. As you grow, so does your brand. The need for personal branding arises from the fact that globalization has increased competition in the workplace. As the wheat is separated from the chaff, if you are left standing, you are left standing with others of good caliber. The playing field is now that much more challenging since your competition is as good as, or better, than you.

All new or emerging businesses are rightfully cautious of the big investment required to launch a successful web presence. A new cost-effective and time-saving service enables companies to fast track their strategic and tactical web initiatives while still actively growing their user base. Unlike past methods of web development, rapid prototyping is a back-to-front development process that allows the product user interface to be fully designed before writing any code.

From Application Virtualization to Xen, a round-up of the virtualization themes & topics being discussed in NYC June 23-24, 2008 by the world-class speaker faculty at the 3rd International Virtualization Conference & Expo being held by SYS-CON Events in The Roosevelt Hotel, in midtown Manhattan.

frevvo announced Live Forms software which enables users and developers to easily create rich AJAX forms with built-in business capabilities. Live Forms provides a complete Web-based design experience that can be embedded into any application and is ideal for Enterprise Social Software companies, BPM/SOA vendors, Web hosting providers and solution providers.

Research and Markets has announced the addition of 'Web 2.0 Server and Push Technology Market Shares Strategies, and Forecasts, 2008 to 2014' to their offering. Advertising budgets have not been directly connected to the computer and technology before the Web 2.0 companies started attracting advertising dollars. The massive reach of Google has attracted to advertising dollars into the computer industry. Even thought the proportion of total advertising spending on Internet advertising is relatively low, the impact on the computer industry is large.

ShoZu announced that it has expanded its mobile social media service to Photobucket, Dailymotion, Friendster, Twitter and four additional Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 communities. With these eight new integrations, ShoZu now enables mobile users to interact with their choice of 36 social networks from a single screen on their handsets - reducing the time, effort and money required to upload images, update social profiles and check friends' latest posts from the phone.

Building on its November 2007 preview, Oracle previewed additional planned feature enhancements of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g. Based on feedback resulting from close cooperation with customers testing in real-world environments, the latest preview of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g includes planned features intended to provide Java developers with a unified design and development experience based on new open standards for Java, SOA, AJAX, Web 2.0 and Security and to help reduce the time, effort and cost of developing Rich Enterprise, Web and mobile applications.

Infragistics announced the availability of Infragistics NetAdvantage for JSF 2008 Volume 1 enabling web developers to leverage the power of JavaServer Faces to create compelling User Interfaces (UI). This new release provides a comprehensive package of AJAX-enabled JSF UI components for building commercial Web 2.0 applications in J2EE environments. With the ability to create re-useable components, NetAdvantage for JSF 2008 Volume 1 helps Java enterprise developers create consistent experiences with less code in less time.

A Philippines-based Web 2.0 start-up called Morph Labs thinks its cloud can rain on Google's newfangled App Engine. Morph Labs was founded by Winston Damarillo, the guy who did Gluecode, the only open source company IBM ever bought, a move made to protect its precious WebSphere franchise. The start-up claims to have done all the back-end cutwork to make it easy for developers to get their software up and running as a service on Amazon?s Web Services (AWS), freeing them from Google's Microsoft-like vendor lock-in.

Artech launched GeneXus X, the tenth GeneXus version, designed to expand the business opportunities of companies. GeneXus X incorporates new tools aimed at increasing the productivity of the work team and facilitate the rapid generation of corporate Web 2.0 applications.

As the Internet's newest way to connect brands with consumers, widgets have officially arrived. These portable applets appear on blogs, websites, and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook. Offered by third-party developers as embedded Flash (.swf) objects, the self-contained badges allow page owners to personalize their sites with photo slide shows, music playlists, games, and other content.

HCL Technologies announced the launch of its new SaaS Service Delivery Platform (SDP) AGORA. Service disruption and Web 2.0 have resulted in a sudden outburst of participation by the user and developer communities. This, along with increasing collaboration between independent service providers, communications service providers, application service providers and content service providers have resulted in the service value chain becoming larger.

Zapatec introduced the Zapatec AJAX E-mail Client, the second in a series of self-contained modules designed for integration into Web 2.0 applications. Zapatec's AJAX E-mail Client enables developers to add needed web-based e-mail functionality to their applications, freeing them to focus on their core business.

You remember back in the early days of video games when there wasn't enough capacity on the carts themselves to support 30 hours of gameplay? What was the solution to keep you playing? They made the games unbelievably freaking difficult. Try playing Kid Icarus now after having played a modern game and you'll see that the game introduces artificial barriers and creates needless blocks simply to increase the amount of time spent in the game. If you're an MMO maker and you charge a monthly fee, the more time people spend in your game the more money you make.

IBM introduced t a new category of server designed to address the technology needs of companies that use Web 2.0-style computing to operate massive data centers with tens of thousands of servers. Companies that operate massive scale-out data centers spend 10 to 30 times more on energy costs per square foot than a typical office building. The energy powers both hundreds of thousands of servers and the air conditioning needed to cool them. The growth of such data centers will continue as streaming video, online gaming and social networks spike Internet traffic, requiring companies to build ever vaster pools of computers that devour energy resources to operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Force10 Networks announced its enterprise switching technology will support IBM's iDataPlex. iDataPlex more than doubles the number of systems that can run in a single rack while using 40 percent less power and will be aided by the high density and robust functionality of Force10's Ethernet switches.

GoGrid announced the availability of GoGrid's QuickStart Facebook servers, which allow businesses to build and deploy Facebook applications. The QuickStart Facebook Server automates and speeds up the Facebook application setup process, enabling Facebook developers to create, integrate, host and scale Facebook applications. By using a GoGrid QuickStart Facebook Server, both ASP.NET and Linux developers and systems administrators are now able to roll out Facebook-enabled servers in under 5 minutes, and when user adoption of their Facebook application increases, individual GoGrid QuickStart Facebook Servers can be scaled into load balanced server networks.

According to research firm Gartner, more than 30% of Global 2000 organizations will enter a new era of end-user computing via user-assembled, composite applications created with enterprise mashup environments by 2010. Against this background IBM has launched its IBM Mashup Center Product, powered by intuitive user mashup capabilities from Lotus Mashups, and information access and transformation capabilities provided IBM InfoSphere MashupHub.

Ben Worthen of the Wall Street Journal recently posted an entry about Web 2.0 adoption. He cited a Forrester survey that concluded Enterprise Web 2.0 solutions would gain broad adoption in 2008 despite clear CIO resistance to the siren call of blogs and wikis. Open source technologies like Spring and WaveMaker build unstoppable momentum within the IT organization by solving fundamental problems that much bigger players either cannot or will not solve.

Pizza.com sold recently for $2.6M, and vodka.com for $3M. Domain names are now a global business. The explosive growth in online advertising has seen Internet entrepreneurs earn millions of dollars by buying, selling, developing and monetizing web addresses, or domain names. There are now over 1,000 so-called 'domainers' (as domain owners refer to themselves), as many as 100 million registered domains, and a thriving aftermarket for domain names, with reported sales exceeding US$700M in 2007.

At the AJAXWorld 2008 East Conference, DreamFace Interactive announced the availability of 'Outsider', a major new version of their DreamFace Web 2.0 Framework, for creating Enterprise 2.0 Composite Applications and Mashups. DreamFace builds on the concepts of Web 2.0: Do IT Yourself, Personalization and Sharing and extends them to provide the next generation Web 2.0 experience, targeting the enterprise with a solution to the data integration problem through secure client side integration.

While software developers consider their business intelligence (BI) applications to be successful if they fulfill the core requirements, a much more meaningful gauge of success is how extensively the information derived from those applications is used. The more consumers of information you have, the greater the value you will obtain from your BI efforts.

The mouse was the original idea of Doug Engelbart who was the head of the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute. Engelbart's philosophy is best embodied, in my opinion, in the design of another device that he invented, the five-finger keyboard - with keys like a piano, used by one hand. The problem was, Engelbart's five-finger keyboard and mouse combination was very difficult to learn.

Now, what Google announced is really exciting! I'm not kidding. It's even better than I hoped. Yes, it's only Python, but IBM's PC-DOS was only BASIC and Pascal when it first came out, and it didn't matter. Yeah, I preferred C, but I coded in Pascal because that's what you had to do to get an app running. What you're going to see here that you've never seen before is shrinkwrap net apps that scale that can be deployed by civillians. That's a mouthful, but that's what's coming. Why? Because here is a standardized platform that can be stamped out in the billions of units. Maybe Google can't do it, but the perception is that they can. Who is willing to stand up and say Google hasn't nailed scaling? What PCs did in the 80s, Google is doing now. PCs took the black magic out of owning a computer.

Told ya Adobe was gonna reorganize and put its mobile/devices operation in with its platform operation in the name of moving to a single technology platform and runtime for PCs, handsets and consumer devices. Adobe's new CTO Kevin Lynch, the creator of AIR, is basically in charge of the whole magilla now. Gary Kovacs, VP of product management and marketing for the mobile and devices business, will be general manager of the unit, reporting to Lynch, replacing Al Ramadan, who is leaving.

IBM announced that its new portal software with Web 2.0 support will ship this quarter. Called IBM WebSphere Portal 6.1, it is designed to securely combine information from both the enterprise and the Web. A portal is a technology for providing external and internal Web sites which can deliver information, applications, and processes to provide a personalized experience to individuals. Web 2.0 technologies are increasingly being used for business by empowering people with content, social connections and other tools to solve problems.

Artech has launched the Release Candidate (RC) of the tenth version of GeneXus, which facilitates the expansion of business knowledge to Web 2.0 due to an intuitive development environment, greater collaboration among developers and extended ability to integrate various technologies. GeneXus is an intelligent tool for the automatic creation, development and maintenance of mission critical, multi-platform applications that can adapt to business changes or to technological advances.

The NY Times had a story yesterday, much-written-about in the blogosphere, that said that bloggers were working themselves to death. This was one article about blogging I was glad to be left out of, even so, it could have been about me, a number of years ago, when my lifestyle almost did kill me.

Mobyko has announced the launch of its web 2.0 online photo, video and text galleries, providing a way for mobile users to manage their social media. The galleries provide a desktop application experience on the web. The implementation and depth of functionality provides a seamless user experience. The galleries feature AJAX to provide the smooth transitions and special effects that have traditionally only been available in flash applications. Mobyko users are able to store, manage and share their mobile content for free.

'Unlocking content to be remixed into new business value' is the driver of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, says Rod Smith, IBM VP of Emerging Internet Technologies, in this Exclusive Q&A with Jeremy Geelan on the occasion of IBM's release of a new technology created by IBM researchers, codenamed 'SMash' - short for Secure Mashup.

The Web is one of the most important technological as well as social/cultural developments in our life. Its global impact is rooted in its openness and its capability to evolve on a democratic basis. However, I have concerns. I'm concerned about the significant corporate interests driving towards 'unweb'. Not to pick on video, but to use video as an example. Video, the most recent hotspot on the web, largely relies on Adobe's Flash technology. Not that Flash is not good. On the contrast, it is well designed and implemented as a technology. It enabled the possibility of Internet Video Selling-En tertainment-Online Jan-08 and we should be thankful. However, it is a platform controlled by a single entity (Adobe). We should trust our future in the collective will of the society instead of the goodwill of a benevolent dictator. Another example, the area that I've dedicated ten years of my life to, Rich Internet Application, is causing some great concern to me. Adobe is pushing Flex (Adobe's markup, Adobe's runtime platform), Microsoft is pushing Sliverlight (Microsoft's markup and Microsoft's runtime platform)and Sun is pushing for JavaFX (yet another scripting language invented from scratch - why?). Will Rich Internet become 'rich man's Internet'? Will Rich Internet become the onset of 'unweb'?

Here is a question that I have been pondering on and off for quite a while: Why do 'cool kids' choose Ruby or PHP to build websites instead of Java? I have to admit that I do not have an answer. Why do I even care? Because I am a Java developer. Like many Java developers, I get along with Java well. Not only the language itself, but the development environments (Eclipse for example), step-by-step debugging helper, wide availability of libraries and code snippets, and the readily accessible information on almost any technical question I may have on Java via Google. Last but not least, I go to JavaOne and see 10,000 people that talk and walk just like me.

Despite the web 2.0 hype and growth of firms of Y-Combinator, the corporate venture investment has not evolved at all. Corporations in general are having a hard time adjusting to the web 2.0 age. When I brought up this idea to Microsoft executives a year ago during a discussion, apparently this is something they have been thinking about for a while. The industry's shifting landscape, ranging from the rise of Google, Facebook, to the rise of RIA and Software-as-a-service, is causing a lot of changes within Microsoft. However, it is time to make some changes to the investment model as well. The $150M investment into Facebook was a bold move. However, I believe Razorspeed is going to work out better for Microsoft over the long term.

IBM announced that the Lotus Expeditor software platform is extending desktop computing and Web 2.0 capabilities to mobile phones. Mobile phone users will be able to run several desktop-style applications like social networking, mashups and other consumer or business applications simultaneously on a variety of mobile phones.

Web 3.0 is a different way of building applications and interacting on the web. The core model of web 3.0 states that entire World Wide Web will be seen as a single database. Many tools are being developed through which interactivity between different websites with different data can be enhanced. Prediction is that Web 3.0 will ultimately be seen as web applications which are pieced together.

This session will provide attendees with an overview of the iPhone SDK, including discussion of the App Store, Apple's planned distribution channel for SDK applications. Keep in mind that the contents of the SDK and experiences while using it are covered under NDA, so be prepared for me to talk in generics and leave out specific details that might be covered by the NDA. I am planning on providing a quick introduction to Objective-C for those attendees who may have never seen it and might be worried that it will be difficult to code in (it isn't!).

DreamFace Interactive launched their DreamFace Developer Challenge. DreamFace is inviting developers to download the new version of their DreamFace Web 2.0 Framework for creating Enterprise 2.0 Mashups, also announced at AJAXWorld, and to build their own DreamFace DataWidgets for submission.

DreamFace Interactive announced the immediate availability of 'Outsider,' a new version of their DreamFace Web 2.0 Framework for creating Enterprise 2.0 Composite Applications and Mashups. DreamFace builds on the major concepts of Web 2.0: Do IT Yourself, Personalization, and Sharing and extends them to provide the next-generation Web 2.0 experience.

Designing a state of the art user interface (UI) in a very visual application that is managing a lot of elements posed significant challenge due to the nature of the application: virtualizing and running entire data centers through a browser.

IBM says it's found a way to make mashups secure enough for business. Because of inherent browser insecurity, mashups aren't really viable for widespread business adoption. But what's a little thing like viability compared to the pressure of keeping up with the Joneses - in this case the consumer mashup rage. So to keep the enterprise from hurting itself - and being held hostage by some cyber crook - IBM has come up with SMash, which basically lets information from different sources talk to each other - and create the one unified view mashups are famous for - but keeps them isolated so it's harder for malicious code to inject itself into the company system.