Essentially, the show is an extension of a series of competitions that happen across college campuses throughout the year.  These competitions feature dance teams, not unlike the cheerleading competitions on ESPN2 – however the types of dances are distinctly Indian.  At the show there were three categories, Bhangra, Raas/Garba, and Fusion.  The most popular dance troupes were the ones from the fusion category, who mixed traditional Indian dance moves with other styles like Hip-Hop, Step and even Tap.  The winning group was one from UCLA that presented an engaging fusion act with American and Indian influences mixed together.  Fusion was the theme of much of the marketing at the event as well, as sponsors included companies like DesiThreads and DesiHits (promoted as the first official Desi iTunes music store). 

As many organizations start to focus more of their marketing strategy on multicultural audiences (and the smart ones start thinking outside the narrow parameters of African Americans and Hispanics as the only multicultural audiences that matter), the idea of fusion will continue to be more important.  It will reflect itself in several ways.  Language will be a part of this, as marketing goes bi-lingual you will start to see messages relayed in a fusion of two languages simultaneously. 

At the moment, this is mostly regional – as anyone who has listened to radio stations in Miami will understand.  As ads and commentary on many stations are already in a mix of english and spanish, the cultures are blending and fusion marketing is reflected in the mixed language of "spanglish" that has emerged.  For other cultures, fusion comes through events or food and restaurants.  This growing area and the emergence of mashups are related – but when reading everything about mashups, it’s easy to see this as a phenomenon limited to the area of consumer generated media. 

Fusion is much broader and has even more potential beyond just thinking about mashups.  Whether it’s integrating fusion into your current efforts, or just considering sponsoring new events and participating in set activities- it’s time to think about how fusion could help you market your brand.  Judging from the lack of focus in this area from most brands, it’s certainly an area that offers a strong opportunity to stand out.

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This would certainly turn Project Fusion in to Confusion. Personally I don’t see how this would get passed the monopolies and merger’s commissions in the various countries affected and I think it’s more likely that Microsoft will take over SAP, although Jeff Nolan has some thoughts to the contrary.

Whatever the case, its looking more likely that Oracle will make a move to purchase another BI company as indicated in this article – Oracle Rumoured to be eyeing Business Objects. Great time to be an Oracle Consultant!!

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Richard Byrom is the founder and author of OracleAppsBlog, which documents the daily experiences and learnings of Oracle Applications Consultants and Implementors. He is also an Oracle Applications Consultant, Speaker and Author.

Given the competitive climate it may come as a surprise that Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft are all backing a single protocol for publishing sitemaps.

Search engines typically build their indexes by crawling links on websites. Link-by-link a search engine discovers and catalogs web pages. To get a site listed in the major search engines requires that a webmaster submit the home page URL to the search engines and then sit back while the search engines crawl the site to discover what pages exist.

A new initiative, sitemaps.org, sets a standard for creating and publishing sitemap XML files. A sitemap XML file is basically a listing of all pages on a website, including some basic metadata about each page. A properly-created sitemap can be submitted to a search engine that supports the sitemap.org protocol to help the engine accurately build its index.

To my knowledge, Google was the first of the major engines (Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft) to offer webmasters a way to submit a sitemap.

My company, Agency Fusion, added support for Google’s sitemap protocol into our CMS shortly after Google made this service possible. Here’s how it works: A user makes changes to his or her website using our CMS.

When the user publishes the website changes, our CMS automatically notifies Google that the sitemap has been updated and Google uses the updated sitemap to facilitate its indexing. The new sitemap.org effort uses the same XML format as the original Google sitemap protocol so our system can publish sitemaps for Yahoo! and Microsoft too.

The fact that all three major engines are backing this standard makes it clear there is commitment from the engines to actually use this data in a meaningful way. Anything that helps a search engine more accurately index a website’s information should be considered a primary tool in your SEO arsenal!

For more information on the sitemap protocol, visit sitemaps.org. XML-Sitemaps.com is an online sitemap generator which allows you to manually create a sitemap XML file by merely inputting a website’s URL. This is very handy for websites that aren’t powered by a CMS capable of automatically generating sitemaps.

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Brett Derricott is the founder and CEO of Agency Fusion, a web development company with a sweet content management system.

Brett blogs about technology at Agency Byte.

Popularity of service-oriented architectures (SOA) on standards-based platforms continues to grow. However, they are dependent on the input of the application user. Without that input, the SOA-based application is just the sound of one hand clapping.

Events happen frequently in a business, regardless of size. The movement of inventory, and its management, occupy business planners to a great extent. Technologies like RFID have helped in the administration of inventory levels.

But much more can be accomplished with the right technology solution. That’s what brought Oracle’s Kevin Clugage, product director of Oracle Fusion Middleware, to us via telephone today.

The product brings pervasive messaging to a business. It does so in a package that can scale from smaller companies to much larger enterprises. Since Oracle has based it on a standards-based platform, it should possess the extensibility a typical company needs to integrate it into existing operations.

Clugage provided an example of where such event-driven management can be of use. In an environment where certain sensitive products must be physically escorted out of a warehouse, the Middleware can track the RFID scan of a product unit and expect a subsequent scan of an authorized person’s ID to follow that within a few minutes.

If the preset timeframe between the product scan and ID scan passes without the second authorization, an event would be generated and communicated that a product may have left the facility without proper escort.

Oracle released the Fusion Middleware product in June. The Event-Driven Architecture consists of several components, which Clugage indicated would be hot-pluggable into an existing business’s processes:

•  Oracle Business Activity Monitoring – defines and analyzes event and event patterns;
•  Oracle Enterprise Service Bus – routes and distributes events between applications with no coding required;
•  Oracle Sensor Edge Server – captures, filters and manages events from physical sensors and automation equipment, including RFID;
•  Oracle Enterprise Messaging – delivers event messages reliably with configurable qualities-of-service; and
•  Oracle Business Rules – provides more flexible event routing and distribution via a high performance rules engine.

The automation that drives the real time responsiveness of Fusion Middleware can be an edge to those businesses that run a just-in-time inventory system. More information may be found online.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Although well known enough within the core ColdFusion community to merit a mention on Adobe’s ‘Team Macromedia’ web site, Dinowitz’s knowledge of ColdFusion has not been represented in the blogosphere until recently.

That changed in May when he noted on his House of Fusion web site that a blog could help him place some of his approaches to certain tricky problems where more ColdFusion users could benefit from them:

His early entries track an issue with CFABORT, a discussion on Macromedia’s Flex technology, and most recently, when to use the Variables scope:

Being a new blogger, Dinowitz hasn’t hit a flow of posting regularly yet. That’s probably due to his active participation in the mailing lists, and a hinted-at change to House of Fusion’s architecture.

One mailing list, CF-Talk, also appears as a compiled version on another Dinowitz site, Fusion Authority. Articles from the CF-Talk list and the ColdFusion Podcast Roundup can be found on the site’s pages along with other ColdFusion resources.

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I’ve been commuting quite a lot recently so stacked up these podcasts on my mp3 player and had a listen. I have to say I’m quite pleased with the offering. According to the Oracle site:

Oracle AppCasts are online audio interviews with Oracle customers, partners, product and industry experts, delivered via RSS podcasting or on your computer at www.oracle.com/appcasts.

A listing of what’s available to listen to now:

• Podcast: A Customer’s Experience Using Oracle DBI
• Podcast: An Explanation of Oracle’s Lifetime Support Policy for All Application Products
• Podcast: BPEL Technology: Apps-to-Apps Integration Using Oracle EBS Financials & Oracle’s Retail Industry Solution
• Podcast: How Automating the Enterprise Risk Management Process Helps Organizations Comply with Regulations
• Podcast: Oracle and BearingPoint Bring Value to Professional Services Customers
• Podcast: Oracle’s Applications Solution Centers Provide Value to Higher Education Customers
• Podcast: Performance and Tuning Improvements in Oracle’s E-Business Suite
• Podcast: Realize the Benefits of Oracle Fusion Architecture Today – Get On the Path to Oracle Fusion Applications
• Podcast: Reducing Compliance and Security Costs With JD Edwards World Solutions
• Podcast: Transforming Government with ERP Solutions

Richard Byrom is the founder and author of OracleAppsBlog, which documents the daily experiences and learnings of Oracle Applications Consultants and Implementors. He is also an Oracle Applications Consultant, Speaker and Author.

Durham, Joe Jaffe’s guest co-host on the most recent installment of the Across the Sound podcast, chided advertising execs who don’t listen to radio commercials and fast-forward through TV commercials. Right on, I thought; it would be like PR practitioners never reading press releases or examining media pitches.

But then he lost me. Big time. Durham suggested that advertising professionals who turn on spam blockers fall into the same category, adding that he pays attention to all his spam. (You’ll find the discussion at about 29 minutes into the podcast.)

I’m sure the sky is a very pleasant color on John’s planet. Here on Earth, though, nobody-not even an advertising executive-should feel compelled to slog through the hundreds of spam messages shoved down their pipes every day. For me, the average is about 500, the vast majority of which is caught by SpamSoap, the service I use that scrubs my email before it even gets to my server. I have no issue with any advertising exec who does the same.

Let’s be clear: If spam was legitimate advertising, it wouldn’t be called spam. There can be no benefit to reading a hundred come-ons for male organ enhancement, another hundred for mortgages, and 250 porn pitches, usually characterized by pathetic English because it was written by somebody from Romania with the barest of grasps on the language.

Advertising professionals need to pay attention to advertising. I agree that ad pros who fast-forward through TV commercials should probably consider a new line of work where they don’t hate what they do. But spam? Please.

Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.

If Oracle can pull off Project Fusion without being a major disruption or angering customers, the company may accomplish the most significant project it’s had since Larry Ellison founded the company. Oracle has made some very pricey bets that middleware applications beyond its signature back-end database will be the way to maintain a competitive edge against the likes of Microsoft and IBM.

In an event at San Francisco’s City Hall, Oracle’s co-president Charles Phillips told a group of business people and reporters that they had reached the midpoint on the path to combining their acquisitions under Fusion, CRN reported from the meeting. “Oracle is halfway to Fusion, and that’s the toughest half,” Phillips said to the group. “(W)e remain on track for the 2008 target delivery of the Oracle Fusion Applications.”

Oracle made one well-received gesture to its business customers in 2005, in extending support for applications from its newly purchased companies to nearly a lifetime basis. A previous CRN report noted how JD Edwards and PeopleSoft applications all faced an assortment of end-of-life dates and customer concern before Oracle made that announcement at OpenWorld in December.

In a statement, Oracle said it would have enhanced versions of its applications available in 2006: Oracle E-Business Suite 12, PeopleSoft Enterprise 9 and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.12. In 2007, a new version of JD Edwards World is planned. Eventually, all of those products will be upgraded to Oracle Fusion Applications.

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The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, a $13 billion project, is being launched in the hopes that the world’s reliance on fossil fuels will one day minimized or eliminated.

Nuclear fusion replicates the method by which stars, such as the sun, produce energy. Energy produced in this manner has an endless supply, and minimal waste.

The international consortium consisted of the United States, Japan, China, the European Union, Russia, and South Korea, who helped make the decision on where the reactor would be developed.

“This is a great success for France, for Europe and for all of the partners in the ITER,” French President Jacques Chirac said. “The international community will now be able to take on an unprecedented scientific and technological challenge, which opens great hopes for providing humanity with an energy that has no impact on the environment and is practically inexhaustible.”

Construction is scheduled to be completed by 2014 providing around 10,000 jobs for the local economy.

The parties involved in site selection were sharply divided. The US, Japan, and South Korea argued to build the facility in Rokkasho, Japan. But eventually, China, Russia, and the European Union persuaded the others that Cadarache, one of the largest nuclear research centers in Europe, already had the technical support facilities and experience for the project.

Japan was disappointed in the decision but was satiated by being granted a larger role in research and operations.

“Japan is happy and sad at the same time. We decided to overcome the sorrow and turn the sorrow into joy. Japan in the future will be ready to make contribution to the development of fusion energy,” said Nariaki Nakayama, Japan’s minister for education, science and technology.

The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor will be the most expensive joint scientific project ever launched, exceeding that of the International Space Station.

A site in Cadarache, located in southern France, will be home to the project. The ITER development became delayed when a bidding war between Japan and France erupted.

The US, Russia, China, and South Korea will join the two previously mentioned countries on the project’s development. The win for France comes at the expense of the location preferred by the US and South Korea, which was Rokkasho-Mura in Japan.

Nuclear fusion works differently than the process of fission, which powers nuclear plants today. Fission splits atoms to release energy. Fusion combines atoms instead. The fusion process has been limited to scientific experiments.

The ITER plant reactor will have to sustain temperatures in the 180 million F temperature range to produce power. “I give it a 50:50 chance of success but the engineering is very difficult,” said Ian Fells of Britain’s Royal Academy of Engineering.

“If we can really make this work there will be enough electricity to last the world for the next 1,000 to 2,000 years.”

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.