Online Personal Assistant Does ...

Computerworld -

Patrick Grady, CEO of Rearden Commerce Corp.

... almost everything, except fetch coffee or fix paper jams in the copier. According to Patrick Grady, CEO of Rearden Commerce Corp. in San Mateo, Calif., the Web-based Rearden Employee Business service can book travel plans for workers and apply corporate policies and rates with approved business partners, as well as individual personal preferences. Grady says that because the online service integrates with Notes, Outlook "and any groupware," it can arrange business meetings and make appointments in participants' calendars. (Even ardent Mac users will get iCal integration in the coming year.) The service always knows where you are, Grady says, so it knows whether to book your next business meal in Chicago or Shanghai. And because it knows your rank inside the company, it'll know whether your expense account tolerates meals served at establishments boasting three Michelin stars or sports bars featuring burgers and beer. In Q1 of next year, Rearden will start booking tickets to concerts and other events and open its application programming interfaces so the service can be linked to other applications and online services, Grady says. These days, workers are often left to fend for themselves on basic business tasks, he says, claiming that his service can be as good as a top-notch administrative assistant.

Douglas Levin, CEO of Black Duck Software Inc.

Free source-code service means ...
... No Excuses - literally. Douglas Levin thinks CIOs have been reluctant to check whether their internally developed applications are rife with open-source code and thus potentially fraught with violations of open-source licenses. So the CEO of Black Duck Software Inc. in Waltham, Mass., is giving away his source-code evaluation service until year's end (and maybe even after that, Levin hints). You can arrange to have as much as 25MB of your source code evaluated for nothing. Nada. Zip. Yes, free. Previously, Black Duck charged up to $25,000 for the analysis, which takes a couple of days. Now, argues Levin, "companies have no excuses not to find out what's in their code." Hence the service's name: No Excuses.

Development tool lets end users create ...
... Web front-end apps to corporate databases. Alpha Five Version 7, which ships this week, "lets you build pretty sophisticated Web database applications with little or no programming experience," promises Richard Rabins, co-chairman of Alpha Software Inc. in Burlington, Mass. End users can point and click their way through the creation of a user interface, link to back-end databases and even define security and data access rights down