Tomorrow is history making event at Sun Microsystems with their JavaFX release. This is a major event at Sun since their Java release, even eclipsing the OpenSolaris announcement. Sun took a bold step with burying J2ME and venturing on to a whole new direction, resulting in JavaFX.

Salute to Sun, the development team and also Jeet Kaul, Vice President of Client Software Group. Six months back, I had the opportunity to have lunch with him (Thanks to Rory for organizing it). We discussed very many things, of course JavaFX dominated the conversation. I was really excited to hear about it; back then everyone was still buzzing with iPhone/Android, meanwhile Sun was so focused on a getting a solid product out. Sun made a tough and bold decision, and they deserve success with it.

Never heard of JavaFX, here are some bytes:

What is JavaFX? JavaFX is a family of products and technologies from Sun Microsystems, first announced at the JavaOne developers conference in May 2007. The purpose of JavaFX is to build Rich Internet Applications (RIA), web applications that have the features and functionality of traditional desktop applications, including interactive multimedia applications. The JavaFX products can build applications for desktop, mobile, TV and other platforms.

The best part of JavaFX is that you can reuse your existing investment in Java, smart move by Sun.

Approximately 1.3 million couples divorce each year. Divorce360.com was created to help people contemplating, going through or recovering from divorce. Their goal is to offer support, information and tools to help people learn about, prepare for and handle divorce and the issues surrounding it. Hmmm.. interesting, right?

What does divorce360.com has to offer? Do you wanna know if your marriage is on the rocks? what’s the likelihood of you getting divorced? Enter Divorce360.com -  their mission is to answer these questions - divorce or marriage calculator at your disposal.

Based on my profile, 12% of similar people were already divorced, and I might get divorced (7% chance) within the next 5 years. Damn, is that a good or bad thing?  This data does not make any sense, but I like this concept of using statistical data to predict the propensity of one getting divorced.

In other words, divorce360.com needs significant overhaul to their profiling to command my attention. Simply using age, education is never a big factor for divorce. It all comes down to people characteristics, ethnicity, behaviors, socio-economic status and many more. For example, the divorce rate varies among different ethnicities.

My recommendation for divorce360.com is to augment their profiling to a much deeper level (ethnicity, behaviors, wealth status, location, occupation, etc.,) and then use artificial intelligence and neural networks for self-learning and prediction. Until then, I am divorcing divorce360.com.

Wigix is the new way to buy and sell on-line. It’s a socially-driven marketplace, where you can communicate with like-minded collectors and traders. Get a live pricing history for each item and negotiate prices intelligently. Social communication encourages informed buying. This is the actual business description from Wigix.com. Well, that sounds like eBay, right?

Ever since eBay alienated it’s customer base with consistent commission rate increases, numerous sites are popping up to attract the disgruntled ebay customers. Wigix’s mantra is to offer a reduced fee structure, which was the cornerstone of eBay’s problem. At Wigix, it doesn’t cost anything to put up a listing and you pay only when it sells. Also, smaller priced items are exempted from commissions.

Other than the commission fees structure, I don’t see any major differentiating features. Wigix got few nifty features, but nothing that commands my attention. At the end of the day, it’s all about closing the deal - eventually sellers will realize that fees doesn’t matter. Pool of potential buyers is far more important than the fees. Can Wigix attrat enough buyers? I doubt it. But for now, we have to appluad their attempt to take on eBay. According to compete.com, wigix got a decent user base and unique visitiors - not bad for a startup.

when you think about Motorola as brand, what comes to your mind? A commodity phone maker or a fashion designer? Well, if you are like me, you will think of Motorola as a phone maker appealing to the mass market, at least with reasonably priced phones. Never crossed my mind in the league of Tag Heuer Meridiist. (BTW, Tag Heuer Meridiist is the maker of $6000 phones).

Motorola’s new product, Aura, priced at $2000 hits the market tomorrow. Don’t get me wrong, it is a cool phone, which looks like a watch with good features and pricey crystals inside.

Now in this economy - where the stock market is tanking, net-worths are dwindling and personal wealth is down-the-drain - why is Motorola wasting their energy on this kinda of products? They haven’t had a hit phone after Razor, which revolutionized the thin phone market.

While iPhone and blackberry are eating into their lunch, I just don’t understand Motorola’s strategy. It takes tremendous amount of time and effort to role out a consumer product, especially the $2000 phone buyers would have sky high expectations.

Aura is definitely destined for the deadpool. Hopefully that will  give a reason for Motorola to reflect and get back to their grassroots.

Have you heard about “Tivo Guilty“? Probably not, but you may be suffering from it if you are  a Tivo subscriber. What is Tivo Guilty? Basically it is the guilty feeling a person has after recording shows and never getting around to watch them.

Is this a new phenomena or epidemic outbreak? Apparently not, a quick googling of “Tivo Guilty” brings about half-a-million search results, dating back to 2006.

Is this “Tivo Guilty” epidemic a bad thing? May be for consumers with Obsessive Compulsive Disorders (OCDs) and people with pack-rat mentality. But definitelty not for Tivo; they should leverage this phenomena into a giant mariketting machine. Add new features just for people suffering from Tivo Guilty - how about automatically deleting shows after sometime? Especially shows you will never get around to watch based on the viewing taste ie.. bring artificial intelligence and nueral networks to understand people’s viewing patterns.

Who wouldn’t want a deal these days, especially with the economy tanking and personal savings twindling? Enter Amex’s Wishlist program. Basically, you list your wish list and AMEX will make the dream come true. For example, you can get a Dell Laptop at deep discounts; gotta love it. Apparently lots of vendors have signed up for this program.

Does this model, credit card company owning the end customer, make web sites like Amazon irrelevant? Not necessarily, but would certainly have an impact on their profit margins. This is especially true for traditional retailers with sky high operating costs.

AMEX should really take this concept to the extreme for small businesses. Why do we need Officemax and Staples, who charges a premium? Squeeze every penny out of them - like LendingTree model for office suppliers.

This morning we decided to get some images for our new website, to be powered by myGPSID’s Address IDs. Upon googling, we ended up with Getty Images. Don’t get me wrong, their images were polished and good. So I took time to register; only then you will get the price of each photo!! Anyhow, after registering, you have to go through this painful process of price estimation, answering tons of questions. When, where, how, what of the image usage. You will also need to list the countries where the images will be used - good luck on the pricing for Web usage.

Here is the kicker, for a low resolution picture to be used on the home page of the site within US, the price was about $900. Guess what? we ditched and moved on to fotolia and other sites. In this economy, even the big guns will have trouble paying for that kinda money. However, if the pricing is right, more Websites will buy their product. Hello? how about appealing to the mass with the right price rather than sky high price targeted for few customers?

Is it the CEO, CTO, COO, CIO, CMO, CSO?

This is a loaded question. One  must understand the responsibilities of each of these roles first. Do you know the  difference between a CIO & CTO, Sales & marketing?

Your comments (or see the following poll) are welcome on this topic, I will publish my thoughts in a week (OR whenever I find some free time and not working on myGPSID!!!)

Just found out that iKobo will be opening their doors again on December 4th. About a month back, they announced their plan to shutdown their services. Apparently something has happened, rather changed,  in the last couple of weeks. This is a good news for the Atlanta region. Every failed company componds the failure rates for future startups. At the sametime, every successful company does the exact opposite. Remember, Atlanta is no silicon valley and there are only handful of successful companies - every bit helps.

About: iKobo is an online payment processor that also supports credit cards. iKobo can be used to send money person-to-person, by means of a prepaid credit card mailed to the recipient.

For whatever the reason, I never bothered to become a member of MySpace.  Last week, I had to visit MySpace to try the Gun’N Roses‘ new album Chinese Democracy.  Salute to MySpace Music for pulling off such an awesome release of the GNR album. Kudos to the marketing folks (both the label and MySpace); this marks the beginning of myspace’s digital-reach-power. Either MySpace Music is run by extremely smart folks or ridiculously lucky (details to follow later).

Apparently loads of hardcore GNR fans visited MySpace to listen Chinese democracy. The title song was streamed more than 2 million times within few days, an amazing feat.

I was able to listen to the tracks without registering at myspace. What are they thinking? I wouldn’t mind registering in order to listen newly released tracks. MySpace should think about forcing some sort of criteria (i.e., set limits on the number of listened songs, etc) to increase registration. However, they should be careful and not attempt this with unknown and indie artists.