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.

Image courtesy of Associated Press

By James Zipadelli

Google is planning on building and testing its own high-speed broadband networks in select U.S. cities, the company announced in its blog recently. The company has put out a request for information (RFI) until March 26 to see how many communities want to participate in this experiment. A Google spokesman says, “We will connect at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people, in one or more trial communities across the country.”

One city that is participating in Google’s experiment is Baltimore, Md. A team of technology and business leaders began working Feb. 22, and entrepreneur Dave Troy says Baltimore’s government and research institutions are also on board. “We hit the ground running,” Troy says. “We have world-class research institutions (the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University). One of the things Google listed is 3-D medical technology. This is something that Hopkins has done. We can do that right here.”

According to Troy, there were other reasons Google’s experiment benefits the city. For example, Baltimore’s proximity to Washington, D.C., makes it helpful if there is a question on regulations. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which President Obama signed Feb. 17, 2009, included the Broadband Initiatives, which has essentially the same goal: to “accelerate broadband deployment in unserved, underserved, and rural areas and to strategic institutions that are likely to create jobs or provide significant public benefits.” Troy says that Google’s experiment helps because it creates competition. “Not only is Google getting access to more people, but they are doing it by using an open access approach,” Troy says.

Asked for clarification, the Google spokesman says, “We will allow third parties to offer their own Internet access services, or other services, using our network. We believe this approach will maximize user choice as well as spur greater innovation and competition. Most providers in Europe and many places elsewhere in the world operate open access networks.”

The National Cable & Telecommunications Association, which represents cable operators, is optimistic. “We look forward to learning more about Google’s broadband experiment in the handful of trial locations they are planning, says spokesman Brian Dietz. “The cable industry has invested $161 billion over the past 13 years to build a nationwide broadband infrastructure that is available to 92 percent of U.S. homes, and we will continue to invest billions more to continually improve the speed and performance of our networks and provide tens of millions of consumers with the best possible broadband experience.”

Not everyone is pleased with Google’s experiment, however. Scott Cleland, president of Precursor and chairman of NetCompetition.org, called Google’s announcement a “PR stunt.”

“This is classic Google,” Cleland says. “Everything is about them. When the nation is trying to move from a jog to a run, they’re wanting to take airplane rides.” Cleland says the timing of the announcement was poor because it coincided with the National Broadband Plan.

“They want a gigabit to the home, which is 50 times more than people have right now, and there aren’t any applications other than Google’s plan that takes advantage of that network,” Cleland says. “Google is the biggest bandwidth consumer in the world because YouTube broadcasts over the Internet and it’s 14 times bigger than any video broadcaster. Google is constantly crawling the trillion pages on the Internet.”

AT&T spokesperson Jenny Bridges was cautiously optimistic. “We commend (FCC) Chairman (Julius) Genachowski for his plan to set an ambitious goal for broadband deployment in America,” Bridges says. “But in setting a 100mb goal, the FCC surely recognizes the massive investment by the private sector that will be required. As the Commission’s own broadband team estimated, it would cost an additional $350 billion to bring 100mb service to every household in America. It is thus all the more important that the FCC resist calls for extreme forms of regulation that would cripple, if not destroy, the very investments needed to realize its goal.”

Verizon Wireless spokesman James Smith says, “The Internet ecosystem is dynamic and competitive, and it’s delivering great benefits to consumers. Google’s expansion of its networks to enter the access market is another new paragraph in this exciting story.” To learn more about Verizon’s network, VerizonFIOS, click here. VerizonFIOS serves 16 states including Maryland and Washington, D.C., according to the fact sheet.

Baltimore’s Troy says the benefits for the city from Google’s experiment are just beginning. “It will make Baltimore a world-class destination for technology entrepreneurs,” Troy says. “It also will keep people here that might go somewhere else. The combination of those two things makes it extremely compelling.”