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 If you’re really, really curious, you can see the unpublished alpha here.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.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve seen posts about Serena’s Mashup strategy in the New York times, eWeek, and tons of other places.

But that’s not really funny.

Giving me free reign over a website is pretty funny (funny dangerous, not funny haha). I just finished writing some copy, and me laughing woke up my wife. Now – she didn’t think that was too funny, but I have a feeling my geek humor will resonate with some. You be the judge – keep your eyes peeled for some new things to crop up on the Serena website next week, and tell me if my humor resonates, or rings hollow?

Had interviews with four different companies today!  Then came home and finished the basic house-cleaning on the blog.

Hope you’re enjoying the digs now. Will have to find some great widgets for WordPress and get the flickr one turned on as well. Please let me know if you have any ideas on the widgets you would like to see.

By the way – if you like Rufus, he was live on KEXP here locally today supporting his latest album and tour. He performed one of my favorite songs from an old album: “The Art Teacher”. You can hear/see another live set from 2004 with that song on KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic.  Check out some of his songs from the new album.

I am no longer amazed that most good artists are more to my liking live. I say the “good” part on purpose. Many over-produced artists with badly written songs sound horrible with just a piano and the vocals, and to me that’s the true test: one instrument, or maybe even a capela.

Working on the look and feel. Ultimately I’d like the banner to fade into the original, which I took while in norcal, at dawn lying in sheep dung to get the right angle. Of course I wanted to make this a 600-dpi 17″ X 50″ shot (you do the math) and I only had a 10Megapixel camera, so I shot 3 rows of 12 shots each, and used PTGui to stitch it. Bear with me as I hope to finish up the GUI here in the next few and start putting my shoulder to the wheel around some worthy content.