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Propeople is a Microsoft BizSpark Network Partner

Propeople is now a Microsoft BizSpark Network Partner, a global program designed to accelerate the success of early stage startups. As a BizSpark Network Partner, Propeople can identify startup companies and individuals in the Scandinavian market and provide them with guidance on their future prospects, technological know-how and validate their eligibility for the BizSpark program.

The program itself provides incredible value and the necessary tools to build highly innovative solutions using the latest Microsoft technologies. It provides entrepreneurs fast and easy access to current full-featured Microsoft development tools and productions licenses of server products, with no upfront costs and minimal requirements.

BizSpark links your startup to a wide range of incubators, investors, advisors, government agencies and hosters around the world that are equally involved and vested in software-fueled innovation and entrepreneurship who will provide a wide range of support resources. Microsoft BizSpark offers the opportunity to become a part of a rich, vibrant ecosystem of peers, partners and support resources around the globe, helping you grow and succeed. It's all you need to fire up your startup.

Within the BizSpark Network Partner program, Propeople is an entrepreneurial expert who know all about the unique challenges that young businesses face. We specialize in promoting and supporting startups like yours through mentoring, networking, consulting, and so much more.

Enroll your software startup in the Microsoft BizSpark Program. Simply indicate Propeople as your BizSpark Network Partner at http://www.microsoft.com/bizspark and complete your enrollment form. Once the simple enrollment process is complete, you will receive a welcome e-mail that includes a unique subscription ID that can be used to activate the software download benefits and all the information to establish your connection with Propeople, as your BizSpark Network Partner.

Contact Propeople today to find out more about the invaluable BizSpark experience and all the great benefits we have for your startup.

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Propeople 2009 retrospective

Amazing! This is the word to describe Propeople in 2009. It has been a tremendous year. In just a year Propeople (1) expanded by establishing a new office in Moldova, (2) gained the higher status by becoming an Acquia Drupal Platinum Partner and a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, (3) supported and actively participated at the most important events in the Drupal and Microsoft communities, (4) as well as developed unique and outstanding projects for distinguished clients.

It’s hard to explain all this great stuff in just few words, so we made a 2009 timeline of the major events at Propeople. Take a closer look, as you may find yourself in there too.

February
First trip to Moldova to establish the Propeople office in Chisinau, Moldova.
Michael Drejer, Welin Welchev and Michel Samucha came to Moldova for headhunting. In just three days they met most of the leading Moldovan web designers and web developers. One month later, Propeople had its first five designers and developers starting the work in Moldova.

March
Propeople become an official Acquia Drupal Platinum Partner, the company that provides products, services, and technical support for Drupal.
This partnership strengthens Propeople leadership position in cutting-edge trends and technologies, and forges Propeople as the leading Drupal company in Scandinavia, being the only Acquia Drupal Platinum Partner in the region (along with other 5 worldwide).

Michael Drejer, Welin Welchev, Jens Beltofte Sørensen, Denis Chakarov and Svilen Sabev attended DrupalCon in Washington DC.

Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) Award recipients from Propeople, Martin Kulov (VSTS MVP) and Coskun Sunali (ASP.NET MVP) have attended the MVP Global Summit, one of the largest multiday Microsoft MVP events. At the MVP Global Summit, MVPs receive access to exclusive technical content, participate in direct feedback sessions, and meet with Microsoft executives, product teams, and their peers from around the world. Microsoft executives and employees welcome MVPs to the Global Summit at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington and in Seattle.

April
Propeople got really serious about blogging and social media. Check out Propeople blog... (ah, you're actually reading it :) and follow Propeople on Twitter.

May
Propeople had the privilege to proudly support the Danish Drupal community by becoming a DrupalCamp Copenhagen 2.0 Platinum Sponsor.
"As the leading Drupal development company in Denmark and an Acquia Platinum partner, Propeople has the responsibility to be a part of the Drupal community and to support it. Sponsoring DrupalCamp Copenhagen 2.0 is a great privilege to support the Drupal community both in Denmark and around the world." said Michael Koefoed Steensborg Drejer.

June
Propeople Moldova is oficially registered and opens a fully functional office in Chisinau, Moldova. We're always glad to see you in Moldova.

July
Propeople representative, Martin Kulov, in the jury for Imagine Cup 2009.

Imagine Cup 2009, held in Cairo on July 02-08, is the world’s largest students contest on Microsoft technologies. Martin Kulov was invited to be part of the jury along with other very important and respected Microsoft professionals.

August
Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and Small Business Specialist
Propeople is officially a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. The MS Gold Certified Partner status represents the highest level of competence and expertise with Microsoft technologies, and the closest working relationship with Microsoft. Propeople was also assigned the special competency as a Small Business Specialist through proven competency in marketing, selling, planning, and building solutions for small businesses.

September
Live blogging from DrupalCon Paris
As an Acquia Drupal Platinum Partner, Propeople has actively participated at DrupalCon Paris and has provided live coverage from the conference on Propeople blog. Check out our live coverage on the DrupalCon Paris tag.

November
ProPeople is now a Microsoft BizSpark Network Partner
Being a BizSpark Network Partner, Propeople can now identify startup companies and individuals in the Scandinavian market and provide them with guidance on their future prospects, technological know-how and validate their eligibility for the BizSpark program. The program itself provides incredible value and the necessary tools to build highly innovative solutions using the latest Microsoft technologies.

December
One of the greatest news for the New Year is that DrupalCon is coming to Copenhagen in August 2010. Propeople will do all the best to make DrupalCon Copenhagen an awesome and unforgettable event for the global Drupal community.

We would like to say a big THANK YOU to all our friends and supporters for being with us in 2009. For the new 2010, we promise to exceed all your highest expectations through full commitment, genuine passion and hard work.

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Written by:
Mihai Moscovici

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Contest: Microsoft .NET Framework - Tell us Your Story

The EPiServer Gadget Contest 2009 has officially ended and we're glad to announce a new contest from Microsoft: Tell us Your Story - Microsoft .NET Framework.

The contest is about telling your story about how did you use the .NET Framework to create a killer app and what parts of the .NET Framework did you use to develop it? What challenge did you solve and how did you integrate your solution with other solutions and systems?

Simply share your interesting, powerful and unique solutions based on the latest Microsoft technologies, and you can win one of $16,000 in prizes, or be the absolute winner to choose of a 12-day Galapagos Islands Adventure, or a new Smart Car.

There are two ways to win:
1) Judges Choice: Impress the panel of technology industry leaders and Microsoft gurus for a chance to win a trip, a car, a home entertainment system, or a media internet tablet PC.
2) People's Choice: Get friends, family, and colleagues to vote for your solution. Receive the most votes and win one of three ARCHOS 320 GB Media Internet Tablet PCs.

Get started today! Visit www.mydotnetstory.com to enter your solution now and you’ll automatically be entered in the People’s Choice category. Then create a demo that showcases the power and uniqueness of your solution, and come back to add a link to your demo so you’re officially entered in the Judges’ Choice category!

The Entry Period of the contest ends at 5:00 p.m. PT on December 31, 2009. For more information about the contest please visit www.mydotnetstory.com and make sure to read the official rules.

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New Microsoft products released at the Professional Developers Conference 2009

Microsoft announced the availability of the Windows Azure Platform at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, thus making Windows Azure and SQL Azure as core elements of the company’s cloud services strategy.

In addition, along with Windows Azure Platform, Microsoft has brought up lots of new technology like the Windows Server AppFabric and Windows Azure platform AppFabric, ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta, Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4.0, and many others.

There is so much new stuff that many developers confessed they are having a hard time to get up to speed with all the new codenames that Microsoft just announced. However, the most important thing we want to focus on is the benefits of the new technology for us and our clients.

First, AppFabric will significantly improve websites’ caching, performance and monitoring capability. It will also improve scalability, reliability and performance of complex applications, regardless of where an application will be deployed. This means our clients' websites will perform better, and will have an advanced level of scalability and reliability.

The newly ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta helps to reuse the code through easier implementation of unit tests, thus increasing websites’ performance by reducing the output HTML. We are already using ASP.NET MVC 2 Beta in projects run at Propeople.

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET framework 4.0 increases development productivity by providing language enhancements and new improved libraries. Also, Visual Studio 2010, specifically Team Foundation Server 2010, will enhance our Application Lifecycle Management with better tracking and reporting tools, as well as improved work item management and integration with third party systems.

This is for the first time when Windows Azure is announced to support deploying of virtual machines. This will help EPiServer and SiteFinity clients to get unprecedented availability and scale up and down performance/capacity on demand depending on their current needs and on a demand-oriented price.

Finally, Microsoft released the Microsoft Office 2010 Beta suite that is available for download today. Propeople will be evaluating the beta in the next few months and we will be ready for the official release in the beginning of next year. This will give Propeople and our clients’ competitive advantage in resource and project planning, and will increase human resources utilization and efficiency.

Photo: netfusioncorporation.com

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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EPiServer Gadget Contest 2009

EPiServer World is currently running its Gadget Contest 2009, awarding great prizes for the most useful and technically excellent EPiServer CMS 6 dashboard gadgets.

All you have to do is to enter your gadgets in the contest by submitting them between October 19 and November 30 to EPiServer World. All entries will be rated and commented by members of EPiServer World, but the final decision will be made by a competent jury. The winners will be announced in a week after the deadline of the contest, November 30, 23:59.

Submitted gadgets must run on EPiServer CMS 6 CPT2 and if the gadget is integrated with external systems, these systems must be publicly available (i.e. anyone using/installing the gadget must be able to set up access to the system).

The best of the best will be awarded based on five main factors: (1) coolness of the overall concept; (2) usefulness, (3) technical quality; (4) openness: submit your gadget as open source; (5) time to market: submit your solution early.

The first prize of the contest is a Samsung 42", Full HD TV, the second prize is a Sony PlayStation 3 Slim, the third prize is an Apple iPod Nano 16Gb, and all runners-up will be awarded a 12-month Spotify Premium subscription.

All details about the contest are available on the EPiServer CMS 6 Gadget Contest 2009 official website.

Happy hacking and good luck!

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Mobile industry goes open source

Experts envision that The Future of the Web will be rather a combination of mobile, real-time and service oriented solutions. Mobile is already here as big players stepped into the game and made their bets on technology.

Cell phone manufacturers such as HTC, Motorola, Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson, Philips, Dell and others have released their series of Android based devices, and some aiming to compete with iPhone and Blackberry. The Android avalanche and Droid mania are pushing Android OS to become more attractive for developers and users, thus confirming Google CEO Eric Schmidt's statement that "Android adoption is about to explode".

After all, it's not only about Android. Recently Qualcomm announced that it has established a separate wholly-owned subsidiary, focused on mobile open source platforms and to optimize open source software with Qualcomm technology. Funambol reports Top Ten Leading Mobile Companies Choose Mobile Open Source for major, innovative projects, including new mobile devices, cloud services, social networking and 4G apps.

Mobile industry is following the web industry trends in terms of technology, integration and adoption. 2009 was the year of maturity for how open source can be used as a tool for cheaper, faster collaborative software development, which reduces barriers to entry and breeds innovation. 2010 will be the year of open source leadership on the web and mobile. Now is the right time to go open source.

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Drupal for Governmental Websites

The tech world is buzzing around the news that WhiteHouse.gov is now running on Drupal, an open-source, free and totally accessible to the public Content Management System.

The hype is even higher because of the remarkably excellent reviews about Drupal coming from the White House administration. Macon Phillips, White House new media director told The Associated Press: "This (Drupal) is state-of-the-art technology and the government is a participant in it. We now have a technology platform to get more and more voices on the site."

In addition, Dries Buytaert, Drupal's founder, points out few crucial elements about WhiteHouse.gov, Drupal and open-source technology in general:

"Drupal is a perfect match for an open and transparent government. Drupal is a great fit to reduce cost and to act quickly. Drupal's flexibility and modularity enables organizations to build sites quickly at lower cost than most other systems.
Governments realize that Open Source does not pose additional risks compared to proprietary software they are not being locked into a particular technology... they can benefit from the innovation that is the result of thousands of developers collaborating on Drupal.
Drupal can help governments provide greater transparency, higher velocity, and more flexibility." source

However, there were concerns raised about the security level of the open-source technology. When it comes to security issues in Drupal, it is important to know that Drupal is made collaboratively by thousands exceptional developers that put all their best knowledge and skills into making Drupal the best CMS in the world.

"Security is fundamentally built into the development process because the community is made up of people from all across the world, and they look at the source code from the very start of the process until it's deployed and after," said Terri Molini of Open Source for America. source

Take a look at our Ultimate Drupal Showcase to see the multitude of governmental websites already running on Drupal from countries such as USA, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Canada, New Zealand, etc. Here are just some quick examples of governmental websites:

White House

French Government


Dutch State Service for Cultural Heritage


Belgium

More articles
Whitehouse.gov using Drupal
Thoughts on the Whitehouse.gov switch to Drupal
White House opens Web site programming to public
WhiteHouse.gov Goes Drupal
Obama elsker open source: Whitehouse.gov skifter til Drupal (Danish)

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Mihai Moscovici

 

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Drupal for .edu

University websites are one of the most complex online systems: 1) hundred of thousands accounts, 2) wide variety of integrated components: class scheduler, financial calculator, school email, library, etc. 3) multiple sophisticated algorithms running simultaneously, 4) high degree of flexibility and customization, and many other smaller but vital components. Any .edu site requires a powerful and yet flexible Content Management System that would comply with all complex requirements, and it seems that Drupal is perfectly suited for university websites.

Many universities and colleges are already successful in using Drupal and we had presented some of them in our Ultimate Drupal Showcase. However, recently we had discovered that more universities and colleges are committing their .edu site to Drupal.

Rutgers University, the largest university in the state of New Jersey, is running rutgers.edu on Drupal.

Duke University is located in North Carolina and has about 13,000 undergraduate and graduate students. U.S. News & World Report ranked Duke's undergraduate program 10th among national universities, and the medical, law, and business schools among the top 12 in the USA. duke.edu is now on Drupal.

Strayer University, with more than 44,000 students and over 70 campuses, is also using Drupal as their primary CMS.

Portland State University (PSU), with more than 24,000 students, has recently switched to Drupal.

Stanford Humanities Center is also on Drupal.

In addition, you can watch Paul Albert of Cornell University making a case before administration to use Drupal and providing an excellent overview of how universities Drupal is perfectly suited for any .edu website.

More educational sites on Drupal are listed in the University & Research section of our Ultimate Drupal Showcase and on Drupal founder's, Dries Buytaert, personal blog, under the Education category.

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Business models of the new web

It seems micropayments are the general trend on the web. Early in September, Google announced its micropayments platform that could save the newspaper industry, or to help monetize the all free new/social media. On the other side, there are many local/regional players betting on micropayments. For instance, micropayments.dk is a new initiative in Denmark that already managed to attract on their side some of the biggest national content producers.

Yes, the micropayment system has a huge potential, but there are other solutions that offer new business opportunities and call for innovation. This is one of the perspectives found in a recent study on "Business models of the new web: The economics of content, software and social networks" by Nikita Gazarov. The research paper is about 30 pages, but it's totally worth the reading. Here is a brief summary of the study with its main concepts and statements:

The micropayment problem
There are various payment methods which balance between convenience, security and minimizing technical costs, but ultimately there is a tradeoff between them, and the overall transaction costs are generally too high to use per-article pricing. An obvious solution would be to sell access to bundles of articles... but as the demand for such content is really thin, it's never a significant part of the total revenue.

Links and visitor multiplication
Increased number of visitors means increased number of links which means that the number of visitors is further increased (both via links and searches) (the loop goes on). This effect makes it much more costly, than an oversimplified economic analysis may show, to hide the content behind a paywall. Free content would significantly increase traffic to newspapers' websites, but it would be worthless if it could not be converted into revenue.

Advertising
The fundamental problem with current advertising technology, however, is that it prevents the spread of information. It relies on pageviews and thus restricts the use of content/information to a particular website. However, if the copyright holder had a way to get significant revenue from republishing, it would be in his best interest to allow to republish their content. Actually, it's a solid business opportunity to create an advertising platform that would take the origin of the article into consideration and split the revenue from page-views between the copyright holder, the republishing website and the ad platform.

P.S. Indeed, it's easier to manage and handle a micropayments system, but it's not clear whether it would be good enough to save the newspaper industry. Having a more complex approach, like the one mentioned in the research-paper, could provide an alternative way to capitalize on online content. Anyway, the web is about openness, collaboration and socialization.

Image: feedhenry.com

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Vote for DrupalCon Copenhagen in 2010

It's time to choose the next location for DrupalCon 2010 in Europe. The voting is already open for the two candidates: Berlin and Copenhagen. It's a close tie right now (50/50), but the voting is open till October 13, and it's totally impossible to predict the final results.

The Danish DrupalCon Team has done a tremendous job and drafted an outstanding proposal to prove Copenhagen is the perfect place for the next DrupalCon. Among the many reasons, it would be worth to mention that the Danish Drupal community "has organized 3 DrupalCamps, some DrupalDay events, and a lot of meetups. The DrupalCamps have taken place in Copenhagen, each time with more than 100 attendees and a strong showing of international Drupal developers. At each camp, we have made a big effort to reach out to new users and businesses."

Denmark is quite unique in its approach for Drupal. Danish businesses, from small companies to large corporations, acknowledge Drupal as the best solution for their online needs. Just few stunning examples. The newly released fdm.dk is probably the biggest Drupal site ever built (and yes, it's made by Propeople). On the other hand, one of the biggest Danish media holding Berlingske Media is moving all their sites to Drupal. Drupal is hitting really hard in Denmark and the international Drupal community can show their support to accelerate this trend.

Having the DrupalCon in Copenhagen is an advantage for both the community and for the local business climate. The community can benefit from unique insights and case studies presented by Danish companies, while Danish businesses will feel rewarded to have the entire Drupal community focusing attention on them.

Denmark is the gateway to Scandinavia. Many Danish businesses have close connections in countries such as Sweden, Norway and Finland. DrupalCon Copenhagen will bring Drupal into focus in the entire Scandinavia and push Drupal beyond Denmark's border.

Finally, you know when in Denmark you'll probably drink the best beer in the world.

Vote now for DrupalCon Copenhagen!

P.S. DrupalCon Copenhagen proposal is both for 2010 and 2011, so make sure you vote for DrupalCon Copenhagen in 2011 also. Just to increase our chances.

P. P.S. You'll need to create a user account on Drupal.org to be able to vote.

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