I was just catching up on my RSS feeds when I ran across Dana Gardner's latest post, "WOA may soon eclipse SOA as most impactful business transformation agent" which evoked an odd sense of anxiety and the need to immediately jot down some of my SOA thoughts.  In short, Service-Oriented Architecture is a software design principle which attempts to break apart monolithic applications into loosely coupled systems, usually based around business processes.  SOA has been up in our grills for a few years now, and as Gardner suggests the adoption is relatively low for the hype.  I've not checked, but I imagine SOA is in the "trough of disillusionment" on Gartner's hype cycle.  I believe I have some insight into the slow or non-adoption of SOA in the enterprise.

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Last Thursday I received an email from a friend, George Colombo, that pointed me to an article that Apple had filed a patent for "customized podcasts."  I was immediately surprised and dismayed, quite frankly, because my business partner, Matt Thompson, and I had actually developed the technology (we called it Modcast) and implemented it on our former podcast, The Cubicle Escape Pod, back in June 2005.  I wasn't miffed at Apple for filing the patent, though with very little research they could've figured out there was prior art, but I was upset because I started to have second thoughts and regrets about why we didn't push our concept harder.

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This week I've been attending Microsoft's Tech-Ed 2007 conference here in Orlando at the gigantic Orange County Convention Center.  A group of us from work ascended upon Orlando on Sunday and Monday to check out new Microsoft technologies, do some recon on products we've recently brought into our "enterprise" and to get out of the office fray for a bit and communicate the with the people that design the tools we use on a daily basis.

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I'm excited and yet depressed about being at the VSLive! conference in Orlando, FL. I like going to conferences. I enjoy the experience of the hotels, the routines and the knowledge sharing. But it's also very depressing and frustrating because it revolves around Microsoft.

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Cartoon Logic: A Day in the Life

Here’s a story for you entrepreneurs. My very first company was called Cartoon Logic. It was a sole-proprietorship that I established in July of 1997, after my second year of college. I started the company to prove that my Computer Science education was applicable in the real world.

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