Ok, I know a bunch of people are waiting for me to comment on Opera Unite and what it does (or does not) have to do with oponia. That and the embarrassing last post from January promising to post more. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, I fail. What can I say? I’m job hunting. If you want me to blog more, hire me 😉
Category Archives: oponia
oponia
I Love Our Alpha Users
Coming up with an idea for a software product and trying to make it a reality are scary, difficult, and above all lonely undertakings. It’s easy to become discouraged. I’d like to say that the early users of oponia’s ucaster have been a pleasure and an inspiration and have made it all worthwhile. They’ve come up with great suggestions; patiently helped us track down problems; and provided encouragement and positive feedback that have really lifted everyone’s spirits on many occassions. Some have even volunteered to help with enhancements!
To all our early users I just want to say a very heartfelt “Thank you!” Your support has been–and continutes to be–invaluable to the whole team and we really can’t thank you enough.
Frictionless File Exchange
Move your mouse pointer away from that “Attach” button! There’s a better way….
Lowering the Barriers to Web Citizenship
Leigh will have plenty to say later on about why we’re so stoked about our new product, ucaster. But first I want to say a little bit about why we built the tecnhnology behind the product in the first place.
In a nutshell, it just bugged me that every computer and every device was not actually a node on the Web. Despite the fact that personal computers in particular are more than powerful enough to act as web servers, the physical and logical topology of the Interent as deployed relegates most devices to being web clients only.
The Web 2.0 phenomenon has improved the capabilities of lowly web-clients, allowing them to contribute content as well as consume it. This is a great thing, and I don’t mean any insult by saying that by itself it just isn’t enough.
I wanted a Web that was end-to-end. Where every device could provide as well as consume web services and content. Where every shared resource had a resolvable URL.
Just because your laptop or your phone don’t have the full power and connectivity of the “great server cloud in the sky” there’s still plenty you can do with them if they’re able to join the network in an active capacity.
So that’s what we set out to do. Our first product, ucaster, is intended to be the easiest method ever invented for publishing your own content on the web. If you can drag files from one folder to another, you’re an expert user already. There are no servers in between you and your friends (or colleagues) with web browsers viewing your content. We don’t upload anything anywhere, we don’t replicate anything anywhere. You own your own stuff. You control who sees it and when. We’re just flinging packets around to make that possible.
I hope you enjoy the freedom. We certainly do.
Cross-posted from the official oponia networks blog
oponia ucaster Intro Video
Though it’s not 100% finished, our fantastic film director pontagious has released our intro video on YouTube. Update: here’s a newer one. Enjoy…
Face Time with JXTA and Shoal Engineers
The second day at the show was a little more of a grind than the first. Aching feet and all that. But the reaction was still overwhelmingly positive. I had more of a chance to have some chats with the JXTA team and also with one of the people responsible for the Shoal project.
It seems the JXTA team is pining for a new book on JXTA and at least one person suggested I write it! (Uh… yeah… in my plentiful spare time!) I must admit it’s tempting. Another temptation to consume time I don’t really have came from a Shoal engineer interested in a) integrating Shoal with Spring for declarative clustering of Spring apps, and b) using this method to cluster JXTA super-peers (that was actually my idea, since our super-peers are Spring apps.)
Finally someone from Sun’s ISV Engineeering team was very enthusiastic about the idea of us porting our app–or some variation on it–to SavaJe, and since we’ve been considering a mobile version, it’s definitely worth a look-see.
We’ve met a lot of our goals for this conference, so the last day should be pretty easy-going. As Leigh says, the last thing we’re hoping for is a visit from a Java Rock Star.
“Wow. Cool…”
We heard a fair bit of that yesterday here at the oponia “pod” in the Java Playground @ JavaOne 07. We’ve all become pretty slick at giving the demo and Leigh is mastering the art of snagging total strangers and forcing them to watch it. Most of them end up being glad they did. Another thing we’ve been hearing quite a bit is: “hey, this actually looks really useful.” Umm… yeah. We kinda planned it that way, but we’re glad you agree. 😉
We had some pretty stiff competition for attention from the singing, dancing Robosapiens, the world’s fastest robot, and a Java-powered submarine. (It is a playground, after all.) Many thanks to Mike Duigou and Henry Jen for their fabulous demos of oponia’s ucaster in the JXTA pod.
I didn’t get to look around too much myself, but the coolest thing I’ve seen so far (besides the Robosapiens) was the Sunspot programmable sensor technology. Maybe today Mark and I will go find out what Nokia and Motorola are doing here. Well, we’re due back on the floor in a few minutes so… more later.
oponia at JavaOne
I’m thrilled to announce that we (oponia networks) will be premiering our “hyper-simple” sharing and collaboration platform at JavaOne this year. You’ll find us in the Java Playground in the Pavilion from May 8 to 10.
More info on the product will be available before the show (our team is working frantically on the material now), and I’ll post again when it’s ready to share.
I’d like to say a very special “Thank you!” to Bernard Traversat and Stephanie Kaul of Sun for providing us with this opportunity to showcase our JXTA-based product in such a great venue. Hope to see you there!
Women Taking Risks
Apparently my oponia co-founder Leigh Himel and I have been added to a list of female “Risk Takers” by marketing blog HorsePigCow. I’m not sure whether our company qualifies as Web 2.0, strictly speaking, but I’m sure many people will see it that way. It certainly builds on those trends. Anyway, it’s nice to see so many women getting involved in tech entrepreneurship these days (that list is surprisingly long and getting longer by the day!) Thanks to Tamera for the recommend…
oponia networks
Since “What are you up to these days?” is becoming a FAQ, here’s the short answer: I co-founded a technology company called oponia networks. We’ve got some money, some super-smart people, and a cool project on the go. Our lawyers won’t let me say much about what we’re doing just yet, but I can say that we’re developing distributed applications for the consumer and enterprise markets. We think we’re going to change the way people use the web—but then doesn’t everybody say that these days? Heh.
Stay tuned for some more info on the alpha in a few days…