Ever wondered which one of your dogs got into the fresh baked cookies that were cooling on the kitchen table while you were in the home office checking your email? Did your sweet innocent furry feline actually scare the Goldfish to death? Well guess no more…Google has released the species breaking Translate For Animals.

2 weeks in the making, Google Translate for Animals finally gets humankind and the animal world on level speaking terms. Version 1.0 of Google Translate For Animals has been released on the Android Market in English but soon will translate to a number of Latin and Han based languages including Mandarin, Japanese, Pig-Latin and Gibberish.

Powered by an Advanced Cognitive Linguistic Algorithm that measures Neuro Biological Acoustics,  Google Translate for Animals will initially be released only on Android but should be available soon for the IPhone and (gasp) even Windows 7 mobile.

Enterprise 2.0 Software Patents

In a sign that Social Computing in the Enterprise is now going mainstream, Alexander Wolfe reviews 13 recent Enterprise 2.0 patent applications.

CA Acquires Cloud Consulting Firm

CA continues its acquisition strategy with the purchase of Silicon Valley based 4Base; one of the more established Cloud Consulting firms in the industry

Is the Cloud Ready For Open Source?

Ashlee Vance comments on how RackSpace OpenStack might finally open the gates for Open Source Cloud Computing solutions.

Will China Become The Leader In The Semantic Web

Do current events point to a future where China will be the de facto Semantic Web Leader?

Amazon Launches Relational Database Service
Amazon this week launched its Relational Database Service.(RDS) Amazon RDS is a MYSQL 5.1 database offering that will compete directly with Joyent’s recently announced MySQL Accelerator and indirectly (but not at an enterprise level) with Microsoft SQL Azure.

Cloud Wars Begin
Amazon also announced a 15% drop in pricing for all EC2 instance families and sizes. This is significant due to the fact that one can expect EC2 competitors like GoGrid and Softlayer to follow suit and lower pricing as well.

Stephen Baker Researches Enterprise 2.0 Consulting
Over on BusinessWeek; Stephen Baker is creating a few articles on Enterprise 2.0 Consulting. Will be interesting to see whether his research indicates that Enterprise 2.0 consulting is a viable industry or more of the sometimes dubious Social Media consulting with an Enterprise twist.

W3C announces OWL2
The Semantic Web group within W3C released the OWL2 recommendation. OWL2 is part of the W3C’s Semantic Web Toolkit and is a standard for representing knowledge on the Web.

GSA launches Apps.Gov
The General Services Administration has launched the long awaited Apps.Gov site. Intended as a one stop shop for US government agencies keen on getting into the cloud, the site lists vendor provided Social Media, Business, Productivity and IT Services applications.

Are Washington Post’s Policies A Sign of The Future?
The Washington Post’s draconian Social Media Policy for its staffers has raised the question of whether strict Social Media Guidelines will become the norm in corporate America.

Practical Web 3.0 Applications
An interesting listing of 13 useful Semantic Web application over on ThoughtPick

Is this the Best Enterprise 2.0 Definition?
Bill Ives has posted what is probably the best Enterprise 2.0 definition I have seen to date. Now it will be up to a vendor to actually sell Enterprise 2.0 solutions to a customer with this definition.

Are Cloud Computing Security Standards More Than an Afterthought?
Good Article on CIO.com that talks about the nascent efforts on developing cloud computing security standards.

What is Cloud Computing ?? What ISN’T cloud computing??
If you can skip past the marketing in the article,you will find one of the better definitions of Cloud Computing.

Enterprise 2.0 and Blogging should be First Practiced In House
Gil Yehuda captures a few good reasons why Blogging and Enterprise 2.0 efforts should always be practiced behind the firewall prior to releasing content to a public stage.

Do Multi-Tenant Architecures Save Costs and Should Customers Care?
Sinclair Schuller; over on SaasBlogs, provides a few key counterpoints to the recent conversations amongst bloggers and analysts about the purported cost savings of Multi-Tenant Architectures.

Can The Semantic Web Be CrowdSourced?
Finding Semantic Metadata on the web is still extremely rare. To help further adoption of the Semantic Web Aleksander Kmetec proposes using Crowdsourcing methods to build the linked data cloud.

There are a number of conferences and workshops with themes related to the Semantic Web being held in the last quarter of 2008.

First up is the 7th annual International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) being held in Karlsruhe, Deutschland on Oct 26 – Oct 30 2008. The ISWC 2008 conference will have a strong focus on Semantic Web Ontology and research.

The OntoContent 2008 workshop is being held in Monterrey Mexico on November 28 2008. This conference has many workshops relating to Semantic Ontologies.

The International Workshop on Interacting with Multimedia Content in the Social Semantic Web (IMC-SSW) will be held on Dec 3 2008 in Koblenz, Deutschland. This workshop; held in conjunction with the Semantic and Digital Media Technologies Conference, has topics that explore utilizing Semantic Web technology with multimedia.

On December 8th – Dec 11 2008, the 3rd Annual Asian Semantic Web Conference (ASWC) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand. This conference normally focuses on Semantic Web Services, Applications and Social Networking.

Trampoline Systems; a London Based provider of Enterprise Social Software, recently launched SONAR FlightDeck at the Network Roundtable in Washington DC.

SONAR Flightdeck is the latest product in Trampoline Systems SONAR Suite product line. Flightdeck is a enterprise social networking tool that helps companies focus on knowledge and relationship identification.

Flightdeck works by gathering high value strategic information gathered in everyday corporate communications such as email, wiki’s, blogs and documents and helps managers visualize and identify the top influencers and performers , bottlenecks and even the social networking laggards within a company.

Flightdeck runs on top of the SONAR Server which is an analytical engine that is composed of natural language processing and social network analysis algorithms that identify the information flows, social networks and tasks occurring within a company.

Flightdeck would be most beneficial to companies that are engaging in merger and acquisitions, new product roll-outs or major corporate initiatives. SONAR Flightdeck is designed for managers within an organization whereas Trampoline Systems other product SONAR Dashboard is designed for general employee usage.

Trampoline Systems competitors in this space include Microsoft, (with its recent acquisition of Powerset) Autonomy and Semantra.

Buyers & Vendors Enterprise 2.0 Perspectives
Bernard Lunn has composed a 2 part kickoff series on Enterprise 2.0 in Read Write Web. Part One focuses on Enterprise 2.0 from the Buyers Perspective while Part Two focuses on Enterprise 2.0 from the vendors perspective. If Enterprise 2.0 startups followed even half of Bernard’s tips they could avoid the fate (the fate of no revenue) of many of their Web 2.0 brethren.

Selling Social Software To The Enterprise
Ben Yoskovitz; CEO and Founder of Montreal Based Standout Jobs, follows on to the Read Write Web articles with his tips on selling social software to the Enterprise. Ben’s tips on creating distribution channels and managing market perception are very important but often neglected by Enterprise 2.0 Startups.

The Semantic Web Has An Image Problem
Peter Sweeney waxes poetic about the Semantic Web’s branding and perception issues.

Is It Time for the Creation Of Cloud Computing Standards?
Reuven Cohen lays out a strong foundation for the creation of standards for Cloud Computing. I am a big fan of standards as SOA and Web Services did not take off until global standards were agreed upon.

USPTO Refuses Dell’s Cloud Computing Trademark Application
A collective sigh of relief was heard from the Cloud Computing industry last week when the USPTO reversed course and denied Dell’s initial attempt to trademark the term Cloud Computing.