Digital Media Buzz > Product Buzz: Apps With a Future

Product Buzz: Apps With a Future

By Ned Smith

Our Product Buzz section gives Digital Media Buzz the chance to kick the tires and get under the hood of a number of new and innovative products. We’ve taken a look at some of our recent Product Buzz selections and picked the ones we think have a strong shot at longevity.

Gold Standard
Our Product Buzz winner with both personality and prowess, is Appcelerator. Its Titanium Platform is a free and open source application development platform that lets you create cross-platform,  native mobile and desktop  application experiences using existing Web skills like Javascript, HTML, CSS, Python, Ruby, and PHP. It can be invaluable to developers who have world-class Web skills but don’t have the expertise to port their apps into different languages. It saves time and money. It comes in both desktop and mobile flavors so you can cover all your online bases with a single code base. You get native power without having to acquire and maintain skills in languages such as Objective-C and Java. The company recently announced that it would add Apple’s iPad to its list of supported platforms.

One app created with Appcelerator recently made headline news. Tradui, the first Haitian Creole to English translation app, is improving communication for on-the-ground aid workers during the earthquake crisis there. The idea for the app came from tech volunteers at CrisisCamp DC. Intridea engineers used Titanium and the HaitiSurf Creole Dictionary to develop and release iPhone and Android apps in just three days.

Silver Salute
Twitter and a host of Twitter wannabes are good at keeping you connected with people and what they’re thinking about in 140 characters or less. But if you have more pressing business issues on your mind, like what’s happening to a sales account or when your new product will be going beta, they aren’t of much use. They follow people, not subjects. Tibbr takes a different approach. It lets you follow subjects as well as people.

Built using TIBCO Silver — the first application delivery platform for cloud computing — tibbr utilizes the real-time publish-and-subscribe capabilities that TIBCO pioneered and integrates directly with any enterprise system. It lets staff follow business-critical topics within the enterprise in real time. It offers massive scalability, state-of-the-art security encryption, high availability and reliability. Tibco CEO Vivek Ranadive calls his company’s buttoned-up app, “Twitter on steroids for the enterprise.”

Currently being used Tibco employees, tibbr registration is now open for the soon-to-be-released public beta. Guess how Tibco’s employees will find out when it is set to go live?

Bronze Bravos
Application plug-ins play a minor but often critical role in the software ecosystem. Xobni is one those players waiting in the wings that can be a positive life (and sanity) saver by bringing order out of the chaos in your Outlook contacts and mailbox. Xobni is in-box spelled backwards

But there’s nothing backward about what it can do for you. Xobni creates rich profiles for every person you’ve ever communicated with- even people cc’ed in emails. These profiles contain relationship statistics, contact information, threaded conversations, shared attachments, and information on that contact pulled from social networks, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo Mail, Skype and Hoovers. Type-A personalities will be tamed by its blazing fast search speed, some 50 times faster than Outlook’s native capability. It also greatly simplifies finding attachments, an incalculable boon for those who are memory-challenged. Xobni is The Little Plug-in that Could.