HotSpot - A Blog by Teraeon CEO Moe Yassine

Teraeon Consulting has launched it’s e-Registration & Conference management System, RegMill™. RegMill gives organizations the full capabilities of managing large conferences with ease, helping cut time and increase registrations with an easy to use interface.
“RegMill gives organizations the ability to not only have people register online, but fully manage the conference in the back end, including integrating with Quickbooks and Peachtree as well as creating and running reports for financial and business analysis” Says Moe Yassine, Teraeon Consulting President and CEO. “The software we’ve created helps organizations cut time in organizing their events, and with the customers already using it we’ve had some great success.”
RegMill™ system is based on the .NET framework with back-end processes that help manage and maintain conferences, and a front-end system to allow e-Registrations with credit card processing capabilites for a complete management solution.

About Teraeon
As a Michigan based company Teraeon Consulting, Inc is a premier IT Consulting firm dedicated to providing secure, scalable and reliable solutions for business needs. Teraeon specializes in Enterprise Solutions through the use of web application development to help businesses cut costs and run more efficiently.
For more information visit: http://www.teraeon.com/regmill.aspx

IBM plans major security initiative - Yahoo! News

BOSTON - IBM Corp. plans to announce Thursday that it will boost what it spends developing computer security products to $1.5 billion in 2008, reflecting an intensifying focus for the company.
IBM executives would not say how much they used to spend. But analyst Charles King of Pund-IT Research said he believes $1.5 billion would be twice what IBM traditionally spends on security research and product development each year.
The figure is separate from IBM’s spending on acquisitions that bring in new technology. In the past year IBM has bought several security companies, including Internet Security Systems Inc. for $1.3 billion and Watchfire Corp. for at least $100 million.
Now IBM says it is integrating technologies from its acquisitions with security software and services developed in house. It expects to offer broader security packages so customers can reduce the number of providers they hire to protect their data.
“We believe there’s a crisis in the marketplace right now,” said Val Rahmani, who heads IBM’s infrastructure management services.
Even with this sharper focus, IBM will encounter tough competition from security specialists and other information-technology vendors such as Hewlett-Packard Co. and EMC Corp., which have also been spending heavily to bolster their offerings.

I was listening to NPR the other day after the 15 billion valuation of facebook. The commentator and guest on the show were questioning . First the valuation came from a Microsoft investment of 240 million dollars for 1.6% of the company.

In any case why is the 15 billion dollar valuation important? Well it’s mainly because some people say that facebook is just a fad, which may be true. However I contend that it is a wise investment for Microsoft considering their need to be a bigger player in the online advertising arena.

The power of social networking is just starting to be realized I believe, the idea that we’re all connected by 6 degrees of separation is what drives the model. Recently I was with a good friend of mine who runs a non profit here in Dearborn and we were discussing their annual fundraising Gala which they hold to basically keep them going for the next year. I suggested to him he post an event on Facebook since he already has an account, so he did and within 5 minutes there were 200 people invited to the event. With those kinds of results, and statistics that show the average Facebook user stays online for almost 6 hours a month (that’s 12 1/2 hour Television shows) I think that a $15 billion is actually fair.

After much delay and anticipation we’ve launched our new corporate website. It’s sad to say but our old one was not updated very much. We’ve managed have this one very much driven by the content and data driven so it will be constantly updated atleast on a weekly baisis.

The new site should give us a better prescence on the web. Hope you guys like it!

http://www.teraeon.com

The Web 2.0 Summit focuses on emerging business and technology developments that utilize the Web as a platform and defines how the Web will drive business in the future. Now that the Web has become a robust platform with countless innovations driving its ongoing development, widespread disruptions in traditional business models are well underway. But within the chaos of disruption lies the seeds of opportunity. We’ll focus on the startups and financiers tending those seeds, of course - including the second annual Launch Pad. But we’ll also highlight how the incumbents are also taking advantage of disruption, or, at the very least, how they are responding to it so as to protect their market positions.

http://www.web2con.com/

Through out the years I’ve seen the web go from purely text sites, to graphics intensive sites, and finally to content driven sites. About 11 years ago I remember developing my first web page. It began as a purely informational site, as it progressed it went more and more graphic’s intensive. Looking back at it now I realize that sites like that focused on the wrong aspect of what the digital age has brought to us.

Today the web is very focused on content. So much so that it is almost a pure stream of information, with the tools to deseminate data and keep your brain from information overload. From Blogs, to RSS, to Portals like http://www.live.com/ our lives have become about managing data and content. The web has hit a milestone in the last few years, it has made it very easy to transfer ideas and technologies rapidly while keeping them in these neat little portlets.

We’ve been working on the new Teraeon website for quite sometime (over a year now). Finally I had a chance to sit down and redesign the site from scratch, and I think we have a winner now. This will be the third revision of our website, one of which never made to to launch.

We will be launching with a Teraeon CMS Server installation back-end to manage data and content throughout the site and ensure that the new website will be consistantly maintained. Keep on the lookout!

PS: I was going to post a small screenshot but I decided against it to keep you in suspense!

The first public Beta release of Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX v1.0 (code-named “Atlas”) is now available for download. ASP.NET AJAX is a free framework for creating client-centric, interactive Web applications that work across many popular browsers and on any server platform. This Beta release is a preview of the fully-supported version of ASP.NET AJAX scheduled for release by the end of this year. Beginning with this Beta release, the Microsoft AJAX Library is also available in an easy-to-install, standalone package for development on non-Windows systems. For more information, visit the http://ajax.asp.net/default.aspx?tabid=47 site.

(Reference: http://www.asp.net)

Many who know me know that as a person who uses MySQL so extensivly, I have not always been a big fan of the database system. Until version 4.1 and really version 5.0, MySQL Lacked a lot of the features needed to create a truly robust data management solution. Lately however, MySQL has made a believer out of me. They have been moving in the right direction with the many new features they’ve come up with, and with partnerships such as the VSIP program. Hopefully this will mean more integration between MySQL and Visual Studio .Net!

MySQL AB :: MySQL Joins Microsoft Visual Studio Industry Partner Program