Ashok Hingorani enjoyed the Rotterdam Conference and writes an extensive report about it on the Groove Forums. tnx for nice quote on our company, might use it for our website :-)

Steve Gillmor interviews Ray Ozzie on Groove's edge services. all very interesting stuff. I had lot of similar discussions with Tim, Hugh and more the last couple of days. some highlights:

Hugh Pyle writes up a nice summary of the Groove Rotterdam event.

Tim responds to Hugh's Remarks on the bloggertool he wrote for the Rotterdam Conference. They had some good discussions on this weekend and the discussion now continues on both their weblogs. Also thanks to John Burkhardts description of Groove's edge services.

Dana gardner in a article in Infoworld: Groove bakes SOAP server

"Groove is very much aligned with .Net. It could also be construed as a Web service if you deliver it through SOAP and you can do these ad hoc dynamic collaborative environments as a Web service rather than as a deployed server-based function. I would say the Groove plus .Net gets a lot closer to the collaborative power of groupware and Domino than does .Net without Groove"

Just got out of a long sleep after being on a roll for 72 hours with the Groove Conference. This has been a very fruitfull and inspiring event and i've never seen so much talent and dedication in one spot. Hugh allready did explain a bit why there haven't been a lot of reports put on the web during the conference but the main reason was that everybody was just to busy communicating with eachother instead of putting communicating with the rest of the world. It was a great thing to see all these innovating minds coming from Canada, India, US, UK, Schotland, Switserland etc. etc. travelling to Rotterdam to talk meet, eat, work, discuss and drink Groove and allready good things are coming out of this event.
The nice thing about Groove is that everybody at the conference allready had long and almost intimate working relationsships established using Groove , knowing about eachothers backgrounds, works, habits and humor. So the moment everybody arrived and met in reallife, the conversations were immediatly productive and there was an instant atmosphere of being around a bunch of old friends.
 

Inspired by Steve Gillmor's article Google, Dave and Ozzie and the Groove Developers Conference, Tim just made a little blogging tool for Groove. The tool takes some typed text from a Groove-edit control, and posts it to this blog using the Blogger-API (Radio version is coming soon). The post is then saved for later use in a recordset. So every spacemember can edit the posts and add posts themselves.

The first guests are arriving in Holland for the Groove Developers Conference this weekend. A dedicated Groovespace will be opened later today for people to attend virtually. 

John Burkhardt has started a weblog. He's working on a project using Soap for Groove 2.0 and is looking for some input from the developer community.

He writes: Initially I was interested in a way to get Groove running on PDAs.  But porting our transceiver didn't seem feasible for me to accomplish in my lifetime.  So I proposed that we try using SOAP as a way to communicate with a Groove account at some well known endpoint.  We showed a working prototype using the .NET Compact Framework at the Microsoft PDC last October.  And now I'm building the real thing! 
I'm looking for some help from willing parties in the developer community.  My initial release will be a public beta that will let people access information in their Groove workspace via "Web Services".  Since Dave, and potentially other Radio heads out there have been asking for something like this for a while, I'd like to know what exactly you would like to see?

KAGroove discusses Groove's competition in the official Forums

Our competition is the current/traditional means of collaboration, which is a centralized approach.

Collaboration is largely asymmetric: functional needs and membership change on a day-by-day basis. People swarm around a process, practice, opportunity, or issue, assemble tools, pulse, and disband. Our customers have told us that web-based collaborative technologies haven’t delivered on the promise of "working the way that people work", for a number of reasons, each of which lends credence to the need for decentralized smart clients. Consider:

1) People want to work on the plane at 30,000ft, but also outside of the office in hotels, at home, or at customer sites. Groove allows connected or disconnected access to collaborative shared spaces. All data in Groove’s secure shared spaces persist, meaning I can access them anywhere-anytime, with or without network connectivity.

2) People don’t always assemble in real-time: Groove’s real-time features (synchronous) will deliver a positive impact on travel costs, but the real benefit is that the Groove platform also supports different-time (asynchronous) collaboration. For companies trying to attack the challenges that geographic and time-dispersion create, Groove delivers both modes of collaboration in a single package.

3) People don’t use the same tools each time they embark on a collaborative activity: Because web services are centralized, a vendor must deliver a common denominator set of functionality which ultimately forces everyone to work within that framework. Unfortunately, collaborative activities are amorphous, largely unstructured, and change every time they are executed. Groove was built from the ground up to facilitate just-in-time, adaptive, collaborative activities and communications.

4) Resilience and availability: Decentralized services have no single point of failure. Groove clients synchronize in the background automatically and without user intervention. If one client is destroyed, others can reinvite the new device. If Relay goes down, Groove clients will "fetch" messages that were lost on the Relay Service from the other peers.

5) Scalability: Groove was built to scale to the size of the internet, not a server farm.

Alexandre Schoch announces on Groovelog that he has started a new Stress Testing Space for Groove 2.0 anyone interested can contact him by Groove's IM to receive an invitation. Count me in. The past Stress Testing Spaces were very crowded 130+ and revealed some important issues. It would be very interesting to compare the old results to this new space.

Hugh Pyle: I've sometimes wondered about the inspiration behind Groove's superb logo. At last the truth can be told!. (Thanks, Ed!)

Article in Infoconomy on the use of Groove at GlaxoSmithKline.

"With Lotus Notes, we would need to use an application service provider (ASP) or third-party to provide Notes software to our partners. All the data would then be replicated through this third-party, a process that is costly and takes a few days to set up." says Wood. In contrast, managers using the Groove platform simply need to run a 20MB software client on each user's PC; collaborative data is then synchronised and replicated in real-time across the network. External partners need only to download the client and no third-party is involved. .

Dave Winer: How to be a revolution

Infoworld's Steve Gillmor on Google, Ray and Ozzie

Matt Pope reports on the Groove 2.0 release party

Olivier Travers: Only a few months ago, Google, Groove and Radio seemed like separate spaces with very few intersections. I've not played with Groove 2.0 yet, but it will be interesting to see how these tools will intertwine. It's also going to be fun to watch how Microsoft might use its Groove connection to sell a repurposed Hailstorm from the bottom up, after they acknowledged the top-to-bottom sales pitch met resistance and a lack of demand.

easy tutorial how to make OS-X aqua buttons in photoshop.

Tim is back from London and picked up his weblog.

Systemware is looking for a superstar developer for software that will be developed on the Groove Networks platform.

Decided to switch my personal weblog and the Groove news section. From now this weblog will be focussing on Groove related info. My personal logs can be found here. also added a list of Grooved companies, this companies participate in the upcoming Groove Rotterdam Conference. More info on this conference will be published on this weblog soon...

Gave my weblog a fresh look based on the Beowulf theme by Michael Jardeen

A wonderful read: An Indian physicist puts a PC with a high speed internet connection in a wall in the slums and watches what happens.

Interview with Microsoft VP Jeff raikes about "the office of the future" at Fortune.com. Link by Michael Herman

"Many companies are thinking about what I call the knowledge worker supply chain," he said. "It's a great concept I learned from Ray. [Ozzie's long been one of the few software outsiders Microsoft executives openly admire.] Pharmaceutical companies, for instance, can't hire all the scientists they need, so to build the next generation of drugs they have to create teams across organizational boundaries. Groove facilitates that part of the supply chain."

quote from Infoworld article about  .NET oct. 2001:

Using SOAP(Simple Object Access Protocol), Groove has built an extensible integration framework called the Remote Client Framework, which allows the client to interact with any other environment capable of processing SOAP.

"Ultimately the goal of the Remote Client Framework is to allow us to integrate with other environments either through a third-party application or through some other Groove client that we can connect through end-to-end security to tap into the native Groove environment," said Matt Pope manager of device platforms for Groove, based in Beverly, Mass.

Just received an email by Michael Herman of Parallelspace. It was sent with  the Parallelspace eMail Groovetool. This company has released four tools for Groove 2.0

Matt Pope has started a weblog about Groove, Edge services and Cool devices.

Getting lots of traffic after being mentioned on Dave Winer's weblog, nice :-)

The release of Groove 2.0 is being discussed in the Yahoo Decentralization Group.

Virtual Methods has a new website. Check out the preview of their UML Groovetool. Mark Smith will also be attending the upcoming Groove developers conference. It's getting near, lot's of stuff to do..................

I have been playing around with Radio's categories and started a Groove newslog. Still have to work on some interface issues though.

2 new skins for Groove available made by Symbiant

John Robb has started a discussion comparing Radio & Groove as a group collaboration tool. He is making some false assumptions on the maximum userlimit in Groove.  Joe Friend refers on his weblog to this wrong statement.
Personally i have spaces with more then 100 members but i'll have to admit Groove is at it's best when you communicate with smaller groups. 

Groove Named E-mail and Messaging Product of the Year By Network Magazine

first Groove 2.0 review by infoworld

Some amazing news from the BBC:   Ant supercolony dominates Europe

"A species of Argentine ant introduced into Europe about 80 years ago has developed the largest supercolony ever recorded.  It stretches 6,000 kilometres - from northern Italy, through the south of France to the Atlantic coast of Spain - with billions of related ants occupying millions of nests. While ants from rival nests normally fight each other to the death, ants from the supercolony have the ability to recognise each other and co-operate - even if they come from nests at opposite ends of the colony's range. "

 Suite75 is getting some nice publicity being mentioned in one of the offiicial press releases for Groove 2.0. :-)

Beverly, MA - April 15, 2002 - Independent software developers and solution providers are rapidly converting their Groove® applications to take advantage of the latest capabilities unveiled today in Groove version 2.0, and many will be available within 60 days, the developers say. These applications will provide collaboration solutions for specific vertical business processes, such as architectural design and medical practice management, and for horizontal business processes, such as customer relationship management and request-for-proposal (RFP) processing.

and

Suite 75 is an IT firm that develops and supports smart IT solutions for the AEC (architecture/engineering/construction) industry. The company plans to port four of its core products - Archtect0r, the CADViewer, DrawingShare, and VRMLViewer - to the Groove platform, dramatically enhancing the capabilities of geographically dispersed teams to collaborate effectively on design projects. For more information visit http://www.suite75.com

Interview with Ray Ozzie on CNET.  Interesting to see how the fight against spam is more and more becoming one of Groove's key sellingpoints.

Ofcourse Hugh Pyle has the answers on some questions about Groove from Radio inventor Dave Winer regarding the support of SOAP, XML-RPC and RSS within Groove 2.0.

Did receive some critical user feedback on the Architect0r tool for Groove. Hugo stopped by today to discuss some things regarding the Groove Rotterdam Conference of the end of this month. I was showing him the latest release of the Architect0r tool and his 3,5 year old son, Koen, was watching too. Seeing the colorful blocks flying around on the screen Koen ofcourse wanted to try it himself. The fact that his hands were almost 2x as small as the mouse didn't stop him at all. Within 5 minutes he was drawing objects  and rotating the views all by himself and seemed to enjoy it a lot. Getting him of the computer was more difficult than teaching him the tool. , thnx for testing Koen :-)

Tim and i have been very busy this week to wrap up the Architect0r tool for the upcoming Groove release. Seems like our tool will be the first 3rd party tool for Groove 2.0 available through Groove's official website. :-)
Although there are still some install issues to be resolved, the tool seems to be working quite fine. Today i have been busy cleaning up our website because traffic is rising dramatically since friday.

Google dug up this discussion on the Magi forum with a lot of interesting comments directly from Ray Ozzie about Groove's architecture and possibilities, lots and lots of interesting stuff. A must read for any Groove developer.

Lots of excitement in the radio community  last week about the new directions Google is taking. With their new Web API's service it's now possible to develop custom applications using Google's searchengine . Really powerfull stuff.

Again a wonderful night for soccerloving Rotterdam, underdog Feyenoord outclasses the millionaires team of Inter Milan and goes through to the Final of the UEFA cup. Last time was in 1974 !!!!  I  hear and see fireworks everywhere from my window :-))

Robert Winkel, an aquainted architectural spin doctor, is getting some nice publicity for his design of the narowest house in the Netherlands. 1.80 width in the Historic center of Utrecht, hehehe

Cnet's blueprint of the perfect Email client, mmmmmmm , It seems that Groove could be a great platform for building this. Gotta think about it some more.

A German company  Element 9 has developed a 3D engine for FlashMX, check out this cool motion capture example. 

Yesterday i saw the movie Magnolia . This beautiful and disturbing tale about life's choices and redemption just took me by suprise. Can't stop thinking about it. This must be one of my all time favorites next to movies like Casablanca, Brazil, Rumblefish, Pulpfiction, Leaving Las Vegas and Lola Rennt.

Wow, a complete Outlooklike email client in your Browser, click on the link "see the demo.... " to see it in action, you gotta see this to believe it. link tnx to Protocol7

"Webdesigner builds home out of flash" hehe, just the opposite of what we our doing but an interesting experiment.

I like the simplicity of this CAD tool called Dexterpen, focussing on performing just a few tasks as easy and accesible as possible.

Sunny weather, beautiful sister, lovely dress, historic weddinghall, new family, apple tree, cold beer, happy parents, big bellies, crowded party, important match, Milan - Feyenoord, good teamplay,  0-1 , sleeping girlfriend, active URK....... Perfect day

Today my little sister is getting married !!!!

While i've been working on some documentation and helpfiles for the Architect0r Groovetool, Tim has been making some nice breakthroughs for it: Exporting designs to DWG /DXF format so they can be viewed by the Suite75 CADviewer or be used in any CAD packages as the basis for a more elaborate building plan. Pieces of the puzzle are starting to fall into place :-)

Discovering the wonderful world of mindmapping a little more, never really worked with mindmapping tool although i test drived some. A new try?

A Weblog dedicated to inform people about the generation of SVG using Radio. Very interesting because this could make it much easier to have a quick visual and comprehensive representation of large chuncks of data and their relations. I think there might be some interesting possibilities using Groove, SVG and Radio in the future.

Again an interesting experiment by Niklas Gustavsson of Protocol7 regarding SVG and FlashMX. In his words: "Flash reads the SVG file (a local copy) and render it in real-time."