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FSF’s “Support ODF” Project

July 29th, 2009 Benjamin Horst

The Free Software Foundation has started a list called Who’s Supporting OpenDocument, to document the growth of ODF in government agencies around the world.

This is a part of the larger Support OpenDocument campaign:

The OpenDocument format (ODF) is a format for electronic office documents, such as spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word-processing documents. The OpenDocument format is supported by free software applications such as OpenOffice.org, AbiWord and KOffice.

Interview with Sam Goodman

July 23rd, 2009 Benjamin Horst

Serial entrepreneur Sam Goodman, founder of Beijing Sammies and other Beijing-based businesses, is interviewed by WCW InSight in “Where East Eats West” – Doing Business in China, about his book and his experiences doing business in China.

Sam and I met in 1997 in Beijing and reconnected recently thanks to the internet. With his new book coming out and a promotional tour in the works, Sam will be arriving in New York City this fall to speak at the Harvard Club and other locations about his book and current projects.

KDE’s Social Desktop

July 5th, 2009 Benjamin Horst

Slashdot pointed out the gradual arrival of the social desktop elements long-planned by the KDE project in Social Desktop Starts to Arrive in KDE.

The concept behind the Social Desktop is to bring the power of online communities and group collaboration to desktop applications and the desktop shell itself. One of the strongest assets of the Free Software community is its worldwide group of contributors and users who believe in free software and who work hard to bring the software and solutions to the mainstream. A core idea of the Social Desktop is connecting to your peers in the community, making the sharing and exchanging of knowledge (PDF) easier to integrate into applications and the desktop itself.

This ties in with the OpenOffice.org Dashboard Concept I’ve been working on as well. Integrating web with desktop applications is one important step, and then moving beyond that to integrate social software makes it yet more valuable to the community of users.