Things happening 19 Sept

Sunday morning, scanning my RSS webfeeds, some interesting things going on that caught my attention:

• Jan Baan, a name synonymous with one of the great ERP success stories of the 1990s (and one of the greatest business controversies in The Netherlands at the time of that success story's demise in the early 00s), is back with a new company, Cordys Inc. It develops web services-based collaboration and integration software that enables companies to create composite application frameworks. Cordys launched its namesake platform earlier this week, aimed squarely at competing with the likes of SAP. (eWeek)
• Father of the internet, Vint Cerf, explains his vision for an interplanetary net: " What we are looking at now is the possibility of using the internet kinds of protocols to support the communications for spacecrafts that are moving around in the solar system." (BBC News)
• The stakes are so high in Oracle's interminable campaign to buy out PeopleSoft that both companies could end up bleeding themselves to exhaustion in this war of attrition. Should PeopleSoft run up the white flag? (eWeek) [See also my recent post on corporate reputation.]
• What's happened to Martha Stewart? Remember, corporate fraud conviction last July? Well, she announced this week that she doesn't plan to appeal the decision in her case, and that she would like to go to prison asap - no doubt a good move as part of what's needed to repair her brand image. (Fast Company)
• If you despise the RealPlayer media player as much as I do, with its ads and popups and stealing file associations and trying to connect to the net all the time, but need something to play RealAudio and RealMedia files (like much of the audio-visual stuff on the BBC website), you'll like Real Alternative, a free replacement. (PC World)
• Very nice add-in for Microsoft Word - WordToys. It puts many of Word’s advanced features at your fingertips by adding an array of icons and toolbars to the application. Great for tablet PC users especially. Free and pay versions. (Scoble)
• Microsoft employee Raymond Chen has saved every spam message and virus-laden e-mail he's received at work since 1997 and graphed the spams and viruses to create a cool visual representation of one man's malicious traffic. (Slashdot)
• Today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Ahoy, me hearties - Arrrr! and Avast! (Dave Barry | Miami Herald) And Microsoft UK issued a spoof press release about pirate day, according to Neowin (but I don't see it on the MS UK press release website).

(Written with BlogJet 1.1.0 build 20 and published live - this post has only one category.)