CleverStart

This summers Olympics truly set a lot of records including the amount of people that watched a single show on the internet. More than 40 million people went to NBC’s website coverage of the Olympics. This is huge for Microsoft because everyone that went to the site to watch the Olympics needed Microsoft’s Silverlight program to watch the videos. But this is also huge for technology because it shows that more and more people are looking to their computers for entertainment, including television.

You should check it out, it was really neat because you could watch up to four events at the same time and even have a separate commentary while you are watching. I was amazed at how far online video technology has come in the last year. It was a great show for Microsoft and their strategy to expand into SAAS or software as a service.

Long gone are the days of static web pages on the Internet. In fact there is a large war on the Internet for which technology will ultimately became the standard for the Internet.

In one corner we have Adobe’s flash, which was originally for web videos, but has worked it’s way into whole sites being designed with flash. With Flash’s integration in Microsoft silver light, it would seem that Adobe is quickly becoming more and more used. Internet Explorer is still the primary web browser, so Adobe stands to gain a huge portion of the market just from this partnership.

In the second corner we have HTML, or Hypertext Markup Language, and this is the backbone of the Internet and has been for many years. Almost every page live today uses HTML in one form or another. Our browsers are built around this technology and have been since their conception. Javascript and AJAX were almost completely built around HTML and javascript is the most widely used scripting language on the internet. Recently Java has been vastly updated and revamped for modern technology, and javascript isn’t going anywhere. Ajax is also catching on very quickly and has been building steam for the last three or four years, I see AJAX growing faster than ever and there are no signs that this progress will halt anytime soon.

While it would be nearly impossible to say for certain which technology will win the web development war, many companies are investing millions of dollars into technology that has a huge impact on this.

If your hiring people to build a new project, you need to invest some serious time into choosing your technology. If you pick the wrong one your application will be outdated before it is finished and will become a relic of the past. This could mean the difference between making a good investment or wasting thousands of dollars for something that will never pay off.

This choice can be very difficult and time consuming, CleverStart is here to help you make that choice and implement it.

If you ever worked for a technical company, one of the first things that they may have you do is sign a non-compete which pretty much states that you will not work for a competitor or solicit the companies employees if you quit or are fired. One thought that always went through my mind is that they really can not control you when you leave the company. If you quit or get fired, the previous company has no right to tell you who you can or can not get employment from. But how would this hold up legally?

It doesn’t and is a really a relic from the dot-com boom when companies on the cutting edge wanted a way to keep their employees. What it meant then was that a company like Microsoft could safely hire people to make technology for them and have a way to ensure that technology would stay private or unique.

At one of my former employees, their non-compete stated that you couldn’t hire someone that quit after you did for a period of one year! A buddy and I started my first company and we both worked at this place of employment. So when we read this, we were like how are we going to do this? One of us would be technically hired by the other and thus directly violating the non-compete. Well after talking to our lawyer, the simple solution was to quit on the same day and at the same time. Thus making that part of the non-compete invalid since we were both unemployed at the same time.

In the last week, California Supreme Court ruled that companies can not restrict employees from employment. So this means that the non-compete is now pretty useless when it comes to hiring or firing.

As it stands now, a non-compete is still useful when signing them with contractors but will that be going away soon? If CleverStart builds a restaurant application for a client and signs a non-compete, according to California that non-compete is void and that restaurant can not prevent me from future employment.

While California is the only state at the moment to enforce this, I see this spreading to the rest of the US soon.

You can read more about this at: news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10010724-92.html