The world of sport-focused wrist-top computers, also called watches, jumped ahead light years in the last few months. While I’ve been using a GPS-enabled heart rate monitor for some time now (The Garmin Forerunner 305), it’s huge, and not wearable on a daily basis (see pic @ right on a typical human wrist). The battery life is also not workable – you can’t expect it to stay on for more than 25-30 hours at best, even with the GPS off. But as a training device it’s excellent – tracking where you’ve gone, how fast, how high, and your heart rate along the way.

So Garmin innovates, and uses in the ForeRunner 405 an excellent GPS receiver in a more normal size watch, this time using the closest part of the batch bands as a way to hide the bulk of the watch. It’s still a little large, but a very workable daily war, and includes GPS tracking and heart rate tracking.  But alas, this thing isn’t the answer to all your prayers. First, it only shows one time zone, which is a drawback in my book. Second, it doesn’t have a barometric altimiter, meaning that you will have to burn major battery to get your altitude, and forget about any baro warnings that a pressure drop is taking place and a storm is coming!

Now Suunto, whose Core device excells in providing Altiture / Baromoter & Compass (ABC), and also sports a depth meter to 32 ft, has out a GPS watch called the X9i, which is not focused on the training world, but rather the navigation world. For instance, the x9i has no heart rate monitor!  As a matter of fact, Suunto offers *no* watch in all of its lineup that does GPS and a heart rate monitor at the same time as navigation features. You can get a training watch with a GPS pod, and that will help with training, but not with navigation, or get a navigation watch without the HRM!

Suunto’s new X10, which has better battery life than the X9i (lasting 6 hours of GPS monitoring and perhaps as much as a month of non-GPS use as a watch), seems to be the best compromise. In a few words it has: GPS, Altitude, Barometer, Temperature,Compass, and Dual time features.

But here’s the payoff: real integration – as a busy busy guy, I only want to go out, workout, and upload from one device, but I want that device to include the navigation features I need rather than having a performance monitor on one hand, and a navigation device on the other!  Now only if  these folks realize – it’s really not that much harder to cram a heart rate monitor into this watch – and it would be a *really* smart thing to do. And if they want a beta tester, I’m ready.

So Shame on Suunto and Garmin – why go 80% of the way, then stop, when it really wouldn’t cost much more, or take more battery life, to build the complete package!

Came across an interesting article from Paul Gillin, who does a great job of explaining a very powerful platform – the Serena Mashup Exchange – in a few simple words.

As I look at the amount of automation we have in place around the Mashup Exchange, the systems powering it, and how we’ve been able to “glue” these systems together for real business value and results, technological progress becomes apparent. SaaS is real, and has real benefits, and the move to SaaS represents another evolutionary step in enbracing the power of the web.

I’m currently attending the Metamorphosis 8.0 show in San Jose today, where we’re hearing about Integration generally. This is another crucial ingredient in the evolution of SaaS – and Pervasive seems to have a great story  – 150 integration adapters that can connect to a SaaS system. More on that later.

There’s lots of buzz in the blogosphere about Enterprise Mashups and Mashups in general: Raf Cammarano, ReadWriteWeb, Forrester, etc. But they all have it wrong — well — kind of.

Mashups are simple, really – here are three points that explain the whole phenomena from start to finish:

1) In music mashups took off when the technology to mix together many songs became readily available. The songs have been available for a long time.

2) The Web takes a previously hidden “tier” of applications (the middle tier) and makes it available to everybody all the time!

3) Tools have now appeared to let ordinary people mash together websites using the accessible middle tier.

Enterprise mashups are even simpler: SOA means that most applications are also making their previously convoluted APIs easier to use, and tools are being built, like Serena’s Mashup Composer, to allow business users to “mash” these applications.

So that’s it: open APIs + mashing platforms = mashups.

Not so complex – huh?

We’ve been hard at work on the Serena Mashup Exchange, which will go into a live beta April 2nd at MashupExchange.com. If you’re really, really curious, you can see the unpublished alpha here. There are a few major UI tweaks that we’ll roll out in a few days, as well as upload some additional mashups and web services during the beta period.

We’ve also started to get some cred from blogs like Dennis Howlett’s Enterprise Alley at ZDNet, talking about our platform, HiveLive. We chose HiveLive because their SaaS platform is uniquely tailored to our goals – i.e. we want to enable people to interact with each other, and have the data be a scondary considerations – an artifact of their interaction rather than the focus!

It may seem like a nit, but it’s a true difference between their platform and others. Nothing shows this more than when you attempt to set up data types on HiveLive. Several other vendors we examined in this area wanted 30+k in consulting to simply create a new posting type – let’s say a mashup listing data type which has a zip file containing the actual mashup, a few text fields with descriptions, some images, a video etc. – all of which is a “Mashup Listing”. In other systems, the data types are at the center of the application, and are not easily modified, whereas in HiveLive the people are the center, and data types are easily modified around people’s needs.

Simply put, this means a much more relevant system that saves us thousands of dollars and enables much deeper self-serve configuration rather than customization, which is the bane of all implementation efforts.

Two totally differnt topics today:

1. We are having training for Serena Partners in Sao Paolo, Brasil. There are quite a few partners here – our training for Serena Business Mashups was filled to capacity. And of course we locally introduced the new 2008 Serena Partner Program, and folks are getting excited about what they can do in this new year. Next week partners will do training on Dimensions, which is doubly interesting to them given the new performance advances. Last, but not least, today the “Just @#$% It” campaign went live on Serena.com.

2. I discovered that if you copy all the flickr uploader files to the right directory, you can automate exports to flickr.com. There are instructions out there, but if you’re trying this, remember that you need to copy not only the uploader.exe file, but also the supporting files. I tried per the instructions here, but nothing happened until I copied the whole Program Files uploader directory – i.e not just the exe file, but also the supporting files. Then things were peachy.

After some digging around in the used microphone selection up here in Seattle, I came across a steal of a mic for voice-overs: the Neumann BCM104. It took me about two hours to get the oh-so-obvious “first thing you should do” when you then install an external Audio Capture Box: disable the existing sound card in your current OS!  I can confirm that the firewire port on my Lenovo / IBM X61T does work with the Edirol FA-66 firewire box, and runs on Vista 32-bit without a hitch. I had to unscrew the base of the microphone cable attachment to flick a tiny switch to ensure that the base defeat was off, etc, but other than that it’s a fantastic tool, with breathtaking clarity.

The same can’t be said for the  M-Audio Fast Track Pro USB, which I never could get to work on Vista, and promptly, and to my complete satisfaction, returned. In comparison, the Edirol is a solid aluminum device with solid switches, dampened dials, and perfect stability. It’s funny that with all these external devices, the only ones that seem to have any track record as a Vista-compatible audio interface are the Edirol line and the E-MU line, which I did not get to try.

I also picked up the O.C. White microphone broadcast boom with the gold springs, which is also a great, silent, and handy boom. One warning though – the internally supplied mic cable is only terminated on one end, so buy your own end, and get ready to crimp!

MashupCamp6 is going on right now (March 17-20), and Serena is here presenting about Serena Business Mashups and Mashup technology, as well as the Mashup Exchange. You can find out more about MashupCamp here, which we sponsor as a sustaining member.  I will also be uploading photos to Flickr here.

As Dave Berlind said as he started, Mashups are Mainstream!

Another goodie for your ears. Check out #7 – Bury My head. Music is solace. Had a good bud over from DC last night. We ate Vietnamese, which deserves a post on its own, but that’s for later. For now, have to say rekindled good memories. RIP Ian, and love *will* tear us apart. Again.

If you are the intrepid type, looking for an opportunity to mix up old-school business development and OEM with the wild world of SaaS and online marketplaces, look no further – I’ve got a job with your name on it!  drop me a comment. The actual job description is here.

The MashupExchange goes live Feb 14th – tell a friend!

So all of you excellent people out there, throw your friends my way!  Serena (and I) need three good souls:

1. Partner Marketing Manager, who will handle our global partner marketing efforts

2. Partner Program Manager, who will manage our partner program as well as  work on a cutting edge marketing automation system (HTML skills required)

3. Web Developer/Architect for the Mashup Exchange, which will be a site where Mashups are bought and sold. This role will morph into a chief architect for the mashup exchange, but initially will be a one-man-army with tons of autonomy and a very visible position at the company.

Since the partner function is new at Serena, all of these roles will provide room for growth, and the ability to create something new and apply those creative and analytical skills.