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Under the hood
The Evite platform has been rewritten. Evite technology head Erik Kellener told me, “the existing technology platform would not take us” where the company wanted the product to go. The big beneficiary of the new platform is the mobile user base; the previous platform didn’t allow the integration between Web and mobile users that the new one does. Kellener said Evite is now built around APIs, which allow services like JS-Kit’s to more easily integrate into the system.

Evite is getting a much-needed overhaul on Friday.

Likewise, the company is behind the curve on social-network integration. There’s no Evite application on Facebook (whose own invitation system is an important Evite competitor), no OpenSocial support, and so on. That’s part of the “next phase” of development, Kellener says.

The biggest conceptual change in Evite is its new social features. Obviously, Evite is already a social service, but new features, developed in partnership with JS-Kit, enable event organizers, as well as the people who are invited, to add photos from sources such as Flickr, video embeds from YouTube, forums, and polls to invitation pages.

Saying the invitation service has become “cluttered, messy, and confusing,” new Evite general manager Rosanna McCollough has had the service re-engineered from the ground up. Users will see major changes in the interface and the features offered, but there’s also, I am told, a lot going on under the hood.

However, the Evite API is not open. You can’t just write your own Evite front end or widget. “If the market demands an open API, we will address it,” Kellener said.

Both organizers and invited people now have mobile-phone options: you can send Evites to people on SMS, and users can send event details straight to their phones.

Future iterations of Evite will focus more on data portability and universal accessibility to the platform. Today’s new Evite is just the “toe in the water” of the new feature set.

At the moment, Evite is essentially a tool for setting up tiny social nets around events. These networks pop up during the invitation process and die, once the event starts. There’s a big opportunity for Evite to bring the product into the modern world of social networking, with its persistent and rich personal connections.

Evite may be threatened by new social network-based invitation systems, but it’s hardly down and out. McCollough claims that the service has more than 15 million monthly viewers.

The Evite team is right to focus on user interface improvements before reaching out to developers through an API program. However, I do believe that Evite’s users would greatly benefit from the platform’s integration into existing social networks.

See also: MyPunchBowl (review), Crusher (review).

Finally, Evite emails have useful details in them.

My favorite feature is rather pedestrian: Evite e-mail notices now include more details on the events–such as date, time, and location. Previously, you had to click a Web link in an e-mail invitation to get that data.

Thank you, Evite, for finally showing some respect for my time. Other new features include the capability for attendees to specify how many children are in their party, and a way for invited people to privately message the organizer.

A new user interface stuffs noncritical features into tabs, simplifying the layout. The simpler interface is necessary, since Evite has more functionality in it than before. There are more templates, for example, and users can also modify any element of a prebuilt template for their own invitations. Also, users who create their own designs can share them with other users.

Organizers and invitees can now add elements to an invitation.

Evite users get more templates now, including ones designed by other users.

We’ve come a long way.

Open source also covers several of the 25 ways Baseline lists to lower costs. Much of IT’s pressing needs are resolved by a greater reliance on open-source software, making the big question in IT not “why” to use open source but “how,” as The 451 Group’s Matthew Aslett notes.

As demand for software development increases, and the number of students pursuing software engineering and computer science degrees declines, meeting future demands will require increasing the output and productivity of each programmer. While tools that enhance productivity continue to capture attention, the best solution may lie in effectively and efficiently exploiting reusable code. But many challenges exist there as well, including minimizing the time required to find the perfect module and avoiding the need to modify reusable software.

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Baseline Magazine lists seven “grand challenges” facing IT in 2008, at least one of which is handily covered by greater adoption of open source. With universities churning out fewer programmers and development timelines shortening, there’s only one solution: Reuse code. In other words, turn to open source if you want a 100X return on your developers:

A U.S. District judge in Seattle has ruled that consumers can move ahead with a class-action suit against Microsoft over how it advertised computers with Windows XP as capable of running Vista, according to an article by the Associated Press.

The federal judge certified the suit late Friday but narrowed its scope to whether the “Vista Capable” labels artificially created demand for PCs in late 2006 during the holiday-shopping season. Vista, which had faced several delays, was released in early 2007.

The suit claims that the labeling of computers as “Windows Vista Capable” misled consumers because many of the machines weren’t powerful enough to run all of Vista’s features, such as the Aero user interface, the AP said.

According to a related article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, many of the computers touted as Vista Capable could run only the stripped-down “Home Basic” version of Vista.

Microsoft said it was reviewing the decision.

[via AppScout]

Daily Dollar Deals also offers a categorical list of Amazon products based on discount, from 10-90 percent. However, those numbers usually take into account used items as well as new–just something to keep in mind.

Stand back! My cheapskate senses are tingling! A new site called Daily Dollar Deals catalogs soon-to-end eBay auctions that have prices below $1. Just pick a category–anything from Antiques to Video Games–and you’ll see a list of all under-a-buck auctions, sorted by time remaining. (You can also drill down into sub-categories to get more targeted listings, and there’s a search option as well.)

(Credit:
Rick Broida)

Talk about a great way to scoop up bargains! Admittedly, sometimes the stuff that’s selling for a buck isn’t worth much more than that, but there are exceptions. For instance, I found four tickets for tonight’s Pistons vs. Cavaliers game. Cheap seats, sure, but if I can take my whole family to see LeBron for 99 cents? Oh, yeah, I’m there. (But make no mistake: I’ll be rooting for the Pistons.)

For anyone who loves the thrill of scoring dirt-cheap deals, I highly recommend bookmarking Daily Dollar Deals. My only concern is how much time I’ll end up wasting there.

Find more deals, coupon codes, and bargains on CNET’s Shopper.com.

Macworld did a little poking around with the recently released Mac OS X software update for “Time Machine and Airport” and realized that Time Machine now recognizes a generic USB hard drive plugged into an Airport Extreme base station, allowing Airport Extreme users to wirelessly back up their notebooks with Leopard’s Time Machine. You need to mount the external hard drive using Finder to make sure Time Machine can see it, according to Macworld.

The wireless backup feature that disappeared from Apple’s promotional copy for its
Leopard operating system has snuck in through the back door.

(Credit:
Apple)

Time Capsule is a pretty easy way of getting the wireless backups up and running if you don’t already have a wireless access point or USB hard drive. But if you bought Time Capsule to replace your Airport Extreme access points and USB hard drives, well, um, turns out you didn’t need to do that.

Apple had promoted this aspect of Time Machine–wireless backups via Airport Extreme and a USB hard drive–in its advertising for Leopard, the latest and greatest version of Mac OS X released in October. But at the last minute, that capability was pulled from Apple’s ads, and Leopard early adopters found they were unable to use Time Machine with a notebook unless they plugged a USB hard drive directly into the notebook, or if they set up a complicated storage-area network. It was never clear what led to the disappearance of that feature, but perhaps the code just simply wasn’t ready for prime time.

In January, Apple announced Time Capsule, a combination USB hard drive/wireless base station that allowed for wireless backups. But at $299 or $499, depending on the storage capacity, it’s a pricey option for people who already own Airport Extreme and USB hard drives.

Time Machine will now work wirelessly with MacBooks after a software update.

There’s plenty of technological innovation headed to the enterprise in the coming years, but don’t expect any new game changers on the order of Internet or ERP, according to a new report.

Information technology is at the beginning of a “new 16-year cycle of innovation and growth that follows the previous cycle of networked computing for enterprise applications and the Internet,” Cameron writes in the report, which debuted on Wednesday.

Cameron identifies several technologies that are already in place but will gather steam in the coming years, such as X Internet–the explosion in RFID and other devices–SOA, business-process management, and mobile.

So which vendors will deliver these technologies? Forrester predicts that while specialty players will have a role, the driving forces will place some familiar names at the “hubs” of the evolving IT ecosystem: IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.

Instead, existing technologies like service-oriented architectures and mobile will combine with component business applications and social networking to form what Forrester Research analyst Bobby Cameron calls “IT everywhere.”

There will be some new acronyms joining the technology mix: dynamic business applications (and architectures) (DBA) that build on SOA and are far more flexible and easier to adapt than older technologies; master data management (MDM), which seeks to improve the quality of data that businesses use; and information workplace (IW), the notion of delivering information through available technologies.