The steady pace of XWiki beta releases continues with 1.0 Beta 4 thanks to Vincent Massol and the rest of the XWiki R&D team and contributors.  Get it while its hot !  Release notes here.

I was glad to receive anina’s invitation to a new 360 Fashion event to be held in Paris on March 1st.  You can sign-up here on Marie’s cool and easy to use UneInvitation.com service.

I’ll definitely drop by anina !

Cuba Sin Fronteras is organizing the second edition of the Cubadanza festival on March 4th 2007 (Hey that’s my sister’s birthday !) in Argenteuil which is a suburb on the west side of Paris. I was not able to attend last year, but I’m making a point of being there this year. Aniurka Balanzo is one of the professors for the Intermediate and Advanced students dancing Casino. She is a real good teacher that I know from the classes I take at Chatou with Antoine Joly and Anne-Laure Gamard. Antoine runs a web site on cuban culture, dance and music called Salsaloca. They are always a LOT of fun and I’m looking forward to class again this Sunday after a break for the holidays.

I’m laughing my pants off ! Although I personally like Loïc Lemeur because he is very enthusiastic and makes things happen, and I also enjoyed his first TypePad meetings which led later to the first Les Blogs meeting that I attended and also enjoyed, I am kind of glad that the marketing bubble has broken, and that some people are seeing the light. Thanks Ross for pointing that out to me since I didn’t attend Les Blogs 2 or Web 3.

What a joke ! At XWiki we focus on the enterprise market and we pride ourselves on doing real good fundamental R&D in the area of large scale distributed collaborative work and integrating those features in a highly flexible and extensible product like XWiki. We have adressed most of the usability issues through some hard work started in 2005 when we were 2 people and executed in 2006 leading to the XWiki 1.0 skin architecture and the XWiki Open Source Edition 1.0 beta 1 released later on this afternoon at JavaPolis. We now have a reloaded stellar management team with the likes of Vincent Massol as CTO and Stephane Laurière coming from Mandriva with an advanced research agenda in the area of the semantic web, 13 other great people covering London, Bucarest, Saigon and various places in France and Paris, and of course Ludovic Dubost our CEO and founder.

The funny thing is that XWiki is a great platform for Web 2.0 applications, probably the hottest open source enterprise wiki on the planet ! So come talk to us you Web marketers if you’re ready to provide real value to your market segment and let’s get 2.0 right before moving on to the next version.

Jérôme Delacroix is a journalist and expert in collaborative work.  He wrote a book on wikis that was published last year and that I always recommend to our customers and partners who want to get a broad perspective on enterprise collaboration with wikis.  At XWiki, we have also been working together on some change management issues at a customer site this year.

Jérôme will be speaking at the next conference of the GFII / ACSEL working group on new tools for publishing information which will take place on December 5th in Paris.

I will be attending the World Usability Day 2006 Conference held here in Paris organized by the FING.  Last year I was lucky enough to have been invited by Thierry Grandsart to attend the party at Nice where I was attending the First Conference on Competitiveness Clusters with Anthony and Florian.  It looks like Teresa Colombi of LudoTIC will be there, it will be good to get back in touch.  Thierry did some good work for XWiki in the summer of 2005 on usability in XWiki.  A lot of that is getting into production through the XWiki 1.0 Skin.

Philippe Pilon is my saxophone teacher. I will be dropping by to have a drink and listen to some good jazz !

Thomas and I will be at the ICC 2006 congress here in Paris Oct 18-19 where we will be sharing a stand with Miguel Membrado of Mayetic Village fame who is now starting up Netcipia in California. Incidentally, we partnered with Miguel to build the first Netcipia v1 on top of XWiki. It will be a good occasion to get to know Miguel better and to see what some of the other players in the French market are up to.

The “Trophées du Libre” is an international Free Software contest rewarding the best free software projects among 6 categories. The awards ceremony will take place in Soissons, France, on November 30th, 2006.

The categories are : Security ; Multimedia and Games ; Company management ; Educational ; Applications for Public infrastructures and for communities ; PHP.

The deadline to submit a project is October 1st, 2006.

XWiki was a runner up and received a prize in the Educational category in 2005 and we have benefitted by participating in various trade shows with the organizers CETRIL.

Ludovic Dubost will be speaking on Virtual Architectures at an event organized by the SparklingPoint network in Paris on October 12, 2006. If you are in Paris, don’t miss this talk by XWiki founder and CEO.

SparklingPoint accueillera jeudi 12 _*octobre *_Ludovic Dubost,
XPertNet, XWiki.org, sur le thème “LES ARCHITECTURES VIRTUELLES : LE WEB
COMME PUISSANCE DE CALCUL, ESPACE DE STOCKAGE ET RÉSERVOIR
D’APPLICATIONS À LA DEMANDE — EXEMPLES, ENJEUX, CONSÉQUENCES”.

En 1984, John Gage de Sun Microsystems lançait l’idée que “the network
is the computer”.

Jusqu’ici le manque de maturité des technologies, couplé au trop faible
taux d’équipement en PC et connexions à haut débit, n’avaient pas permis
la mise en oeuvre à grande échelle d’un tel principe, ni l’éclosion de
logiciels adaptés.

Aujourd’hui, l’augmentation rapide des équipements, de leur puissance,
des capacités de stockage et des liaisons à haut débit à connexion
permanente crée une taille suffisante pour l’émergence d’un marché de
masse intéressant au premier chef les entreprises. L’évolution des
technologies accompagne le mouvement en accroissant la souplesse des
montées en charge (Web-scale computing, architectures GRID…) et la
continuité de service (technologies RAID, architectures redondantes…)

L’offre se dessine progressivement sur le marché. D’un côté les
hébergeurs proposent de plus en plus souvent des offres banalisés à très
bas coûts (OVH ou Debibox). D’autre part, les spécialistes des Web
Services se mettent en place. Amazon s’est d’ores et déjà positionné
très fortement en annonçant successivement Amazon S3 (Web Services
Store) et Amazon EC2 (Elastic Computer Cloud). On pressent également
depuis un moment l’engagement plus que probable de Google sur cette voie
dont GoogleApps et le projet supposé “GoogleDrive” seraient les embryons.

Ce nouveau paysage conduit à de nouvelles architectures et de nouveaux
enjeux :

- comment gérer au mieux la demande fluctuante de puissance
- quelles applications et données garder en interne ou placer en réseau
- quels problèmes de sécurité pour ses données et applications :
disponibilité, confidentialité…
- quel type d’applications on-demand
- quelles contraintes d’organisation, de déploiement…

Inscription dès que possible par retour d’e-mail en indiquant {prénom,
nom, société, email} à cette adresse uniquement :
inscription@sparklingpoint.com

Merci de DIFFUSER largement cette annonce autour de vous. Le nombre de
place étant limité et le RV étant en octobre, nous ne saurions trop vous
conseiller de vous inscrire au plus tôt.