Representatives of the SFE OA will be present during the forthcoming FIA and ICSOC/ServiceWave 2009. Our community will have a session during the UGS 2009 Workshop of ServiceWave ( http://fast.morfeo-project.eu/workshops/ugs2009/ ) where we will present our vision and current activities and explore collaboration opportunities with the attendees of the workshop. Please visit us there or contact nik at tid.es for more information.

During 8 and 9 of October took place, in Telefónica I+D, the last EzWeb plenary meeting along with the EzWeb developers meeting. All the partners involved in the project shown their progress in the different activities defined in the Plan Avanza project proposal. This spanish government funding program recognizes EzWeb as a singular and strategic project.

TID and UPM  presented demonstrations related to the core platform new functionalities (gadget categories, sharing/clone/publish workspaces, external channels, tab advanced management, deferred loading, new look&feel and usability aspects…), INTERCOM shown a prototype showing the integration of the platform with the PayPal payment service, and CTIC/IMDEA depicted several semantic tools aimed to help to the development of new gadgets and offer recommendations in right-time.

Defined action points will be reviewed during the next face to face developer meeting who will take place in ITI labs, Valencia, during the last week of November.

As you may know you can find a working version of  EzWeb is already accessible at http://ezweb.tid.es inside the Open MovilForum initiative.

Do mashup!

After various sessions in important European events (ICT 2008, ServiceWave 2008 etc. ), targeted to make the initiative known and stimulate collaboration, our alliance continues to gain momentum.

The ideas, ambition and objectives of the SFE OA appear  to be shared by many organizations in the European research community, something that has allowed us to already count on a solid core of member organizations.  The initial list of organizations that created the SFE Open Alliance is:

• Telefónica I+D, Spain
• SAP Research, Switzerland
• Universidad Politécnica de Madrid - UPM, Spain
• Viena University of Technology - TUV, Austria
• Université Catholique de Louvain - UCL, Belgium
• University of St Gallen, Switzerland
• Instituto di Scienza e Technologie dell’Informazione - ISTI, Italy

The following organizations have recently joined the initiative:

• Telecom Italia, Italy
• Franhoufer Institute, Germany
• DERI Galway, Ireland
• Fundación CTIC, Spain

In 2009 we have already had three internal workshops , one hosted by SAP in Zurich on the 11th,12th,13th of February, another in Madrid on the 10th,11th,12th of March and the last one right after the Future Internet Assembly event organized by the European Commission in Prague, and are now gearing up our activities.

Since the first workhop the SFE OA members have had the chance to setup the main guiding principles and objectives of the alliance. In addtion, an analysis has been carried out, targeted to the identification of projects that will form the foundations upon which  the whole vision is going to be built. Currently, the following projects have been selected:

•         EzWeb
•         FAST
•         OPUCE
•         MyMobileWeb
•         inContext
•         USIXml

However, the list of projects aiming to contribute is growing.

One of the main achievements of the activity so far has been the publication of the SFE Open Alliance’s manifesto you can read here.   All  organizations subscribing objectives and principles established in this manifesto are invited to join their forces.

Summarizing, we now  have a nucleus of very relevant members,  an ambitious but concrete vision, a solid foundation of results coming from successful and widely recognized projects and an initial set of challenges to be addressed by forthcoming activities and projects.   Join us if you share the spirit !

On the 13th of December the second SFE Open Alliance Workshop was held in Madrid during the ServiceWave 2008 conference. The workshop was also supported by the SFE Collaboration Working Group and the FP7 FAST project. On behalf of all the people involved in the organization the workshop, we would like to thank the people that attended despite it being on a Saturday. 6 projects presented their vision on the future service front-ends and a lively discussion about current and future trends was held. The rendezvous has been renewed for January 2009 to discuss in more details the scope and planning of the alliance with all the contributors that are willing to commit to this effort.

The presentations of the workshop can be found here