Blogging & Twitter

For the last month or so I've been testing Twitter and finding it pretty compelling. though I don't know how I will utilize it for business development purposes. Like blogging, which I started 2.5 years ago, I think it's important to test, learn, and participate in the technologies that hold great promise, even if there is no clear immediate payoff.

As for blogging, I've mostly reserved my posts for my company's blog roll at CITYTECH. My posts are here: http://blogs.citytechinc.com/mwatson/

I plan on catching up on my posts here but for the short term I'm a little more active on Twitter (handle is watty2020) and on the CITYTECH blog roll.

CITYTECH iPhone Application Development Team

Amid strong interest from our technical staff and the continually growing base of iPhone users, CITYTECH has launched an application development team prepared to build and submit iPhone apps.

We had already presented and absorbed quite a bit internally about the Objective-C language used to write such apps (email me for some of our content), but now we are ready to build iPhone apps for clients wishing to reach out to the "iPhone Consumer" market.

Because iPhone app development via Objective-C is much more technical than building Facebook or generic web apps, a hardcore engineering shop such as CITYTECH is well suited for such expertise.

Contact me via email or call me at our Chicago headquarters at 312-673-6433 ext. 144 and I'll get our "iTeam" into the conversation!

Silverlight 3!

One of the guys from our .NET practice sent me a pretty good writeup on Microsoft Silverlight 3!

Inside CITYTECH we have a nice rivalry among RIA technologies with our Silverlight, Flex 3, and JavaFX enthusiasts!

CITYTECH Projects in North America and Beyond!

Recently, after signing up a couple of new clients, I was thinking about how CITYTECH has expanded from it's base of clients in Chicago to a broader Midwest focus. We are continuing to serve clients outside of the immediate Chicago area and look forward to organic growth and potentially additional offices!!

Here's where our clients are located along with some of the technologies used:

1) Chicago, Illinois (multiple projects: Day Communique (CQ4), Alfresco, Filenet, Ektron, lots of Java, Java frameworks like Hibernate, iBATIS, and Spring, JBoss, WebLogic, Oracle, MySQL, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Microsoft .NET and Silverlight, Groovy, Ruby, GIS/mobile web apps, etc.)

2) Columbus, Ohio (JBoss, Seam, potentially a new Day CQ4/CQ5 project)

3) Toronto, Ontario (Day CQ5)

4) San Francisco, California (Day CQ4, Amazon's web platform, Flex, etc.)

5) Milwaukee, Wisconsin (B2B app modernization, Tomcat, Java, etc.)

6) Minneapolis, Minnesota (JBoss Application Server)

7) Dallas, Texas (Microsoft .NET)

8) Abu Dhabi, UAE (Microsoft .NET, Filenet)

9) Winston-Salem, North Carolina (SOA, Oracle)

10) Denver, Colorado (Microsoft .NET)

11) Sao Paolo, Brazil (JBoss Application Server)

Want to learn more? Email me by clicking here or call my cell at 630-881-4771.

1st Quarter CITYTECH Newsletter

Sent this casual newsletter off to our clients, partners, friends, etc. today via email. Send me an email with feedback!

CITYTECH News, Issue 2, March 2009

1) Our new website is here! www.citytechinc.com Tell us what you think! Many more iterations are on the way.

2) Save the date for a CITYTECH Networking Social!
We are hosting a casual networking event on Wednesday, March 25, from 6-9pm at English Pub in Chicago’s River North area at 444 N. LaSalle. I will send personal invites soon to Clients, partners, potential clients, and otherwise friends of CITYTECH!!

3) CITYTECH Goes Global with Day Software’s CQ5!!
In January we sent 4 of our consultants to California to learn Day Software’s new CQ5 web content management platform—our team was already familiar with CQ4 after multiple client engagements and were excited to learn this powerful new version!
Our newly acquired knowledge was quickly in demand. Working directly with Day, CITYTECH began a large multi language content management implementation using CQ5 for a large Canandian/European consumer products company.

4) JBoss Virtual Trade Show a Huge Success!
We launched our first “virtual trade show” with our partner Red Hat to highlight our expertise in the JBoss middleware platform. Our JBoss related case studies and papers can be found on our website here.

We not only provide JBoss strategic and tactical services but, also resell JBoss software subscriptions.

5) CITYTECH Invited to be a Voice at CMS Expo
Two packed days of training on top CMS Solutions will be offered at the CMS Expo this spring (April 30-May 1), in Evanston, Illinois. I hope you will consider attending one of the training sessions led by a CITYTECH top professional or visit us at the Alfresco booth. CMS Expo highlights CMS technology such as Joomla, Drupal, and Alfresco.

6) CMIS Explorer Technology—Spotlight on CITYTECH Consultant Shane Johnson
Shane Johnson’s CMIS Explorer was featured on the Alfresco Tech Talk on Feb 20th and CMS Wire recently.

Shane was also honored as the Alfresco Contributor of the Month for February!

For a background on the CMIS specification, see this link on Wikipedia.

7) JavaFX Technology—Spotlight on CITYTECH Consultant Sten Anderson
Sten Anderson was asked by Sun Microsystems to contribute his recent JavaFX components to the JavaFX Studio community site. This sample work demonstrates our commitment to Rich Internet Application (RIA) technologies. Additionally, Sten was also asked to develop a JavaFX based client for the music intelligence company, The Echo Nest, which provides an API driven product offering a one-of-a-kind machine learning platform that actually listens to music and reads about music from every corner of the web.

8) .NET Technical Review—Spotlight on CITYTECH Consultant Pat McLoughlin
One of our strategic partners engaged the expertise of Pat McLoughlin for a .NET technical review. The review examined a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) based kiosk application which will provide self service ordering capabilities for a large restaurant chain. This and many other projects are fueling the growth of our Microsoft .NET practice area.

9) Red Hat Partner Newsletter—Spotlight on CITYTECH CTO Matt Van Bergen
Matt Van Bergen & CITYTECH were featured in the February RedHat/JBoss Channel newsletter. The question and answer style format highlighted our continued commitment to deliver solutions which incorporate Business Value and Premium Support for our clients’ Mission-Critical Enterprise Applications.

10) Record Attendance at the Alfresco Code Camp
25+ developers attended to learn more about Alfresco’s Web Content Management and portal product offerings. The night was capped off with a happy hour which fueled good technology conversations amongst the attendees.
Thanks for reading our newsletter and being a friend of CITYTECH!!

CMIS Explorer for Alfresco CMS

My colleague recently built a CMIS (content management interoperability specification) based explorer tool to navigate through an Alfresco content repository.

You can read the article, which appeared in CMS Wire, by clicking here! Great to see one of our guys take some leadership on this new proposed spec!

JBoss Migration Tools Forum

It was just announced in an article that CITYTECH is one of the participants of the JBoss Migration Assistance forum designed to help companies migrate from proprietary platforms like WebLogic and WebSphere to the JBoss application server.

CITYTECH is one of the few JBoss Advanced Partners operating in Chicago and the Midwest in general (mainly, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and Michigan). Contact me to learn more!!