In today's podcast I interview Michael Terner and Richard Treadway, who are respectively the CEO and the VP of marketing and strategy for KnowNow. The company's tag line is a bit of a mouthful -- "Simple Integration Connecting Data, Applications, and People: Business-to-Business, Event-Driven, Loosely-Coupled" -- but it captures a bunch of central themes.
A bit of background on KnowNow is in order. The company started in 2000, and the following year I had some fascinating conversations with the co-founders, Adam Rifkin and Rohit Khare. (See also their current team blog, The Now Economy.)
I trace the ideas embedded in KnowNow's event routing technology back to Adam and Rohit's brief but remarkably rich 1998 paper, Composing Active Proxies to Extend the Web. And from there, I trace connections forward to: my 2001 review of the first incarnation of the product, Rohit's 2002 Emerging Technology talk on application-layer internetworking and SOAP routing, various of my articles on linking, Web middleware and pub/sub, and Phil Windley's InfoWorld review of KnowNow 3 Enterprise Edition.
It was inevitable that KnowNow's Web-native pub/sub technology would intersect with the RSS universe, and that's what this interview is about. Topics include:
You can see an example of the kind of enterprise syndication that KnowNow is talking about in this demo, which is a self-updating Web page (imagine it as part of an enterprise portal) that refreshes its view of RSS feeds not by polling them, as is typical, but by reacting to change alerts.
Here's the interview: download (44min, 21MB) 1
1 Musical lead-in and fade-out by Arrial, found in the Internet Archive's open source audio collection.
Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/12/21.html#a1138