Last week I monitored the  Europe eComm 2009 Wave which I encourage you read if you have a Wave account, and I assume if you are here then you do.

If you are not familiar with eComm you should click on Europe eComm to find out more about them. They describe eComm as:

The worlds’ leading-edge communications event. It’s designed to showcase and accelerate both technology and business model innovation; and to explore the latest opportunities.

The reason I mention this conference is because both Stephanie Hannon and Lars Rasmussen both spoke at the event. Their respective topics of discussion where:

• Stephanie – Why You Should Care About Google Wave
• Lars – Wave Federation: Building An Open Network

Also, they had a Wave going about Using Wave at eComm (How’s it going). This was a very interesting and telling Wave and is worth reading. You will see that most folks were not sure where the value-added was. This was a Wave that was started by Stephanie and , in my mind, highlights that Google itself is struggling a little with the problem of what is the use case that this product solves. In other words, it is a solution to a problem that is not defined. So they are kind of throwing the Waves against the wall and see what sticks.

I have blogged over and over again on this site that my use case is the many Business Collaboration use cases that are required on a daily basis. I don’t think Wave impresses as well when you are trying to do the same thing that other products do. I.E. This Wave at the eComm could have been a chat conversation or a Twitter hash conversation or, or, or. The point being there are lots of things that do that type of function. Again I point to the Gravity post as how best way to present Google Wave to folks. However, the original Wave at the eComm was great. It captured all the content/conversations of the different presentations and linked to them all together within that original Wave.  It would have been great to have embedded video into the presentation Waves. Take questions from Wave, etc, etc. There is a lot of value-added that could be given to a conference using Wave and I see that it will find a way to bring real value added to a conferences in the future. Think streaming video, etc,

One gem of information that came out of this conference, pertaining to Google Wave,  was during Lars’s presentation. He mentioned that Google will opening up a port on the developer sandbox to allow federation with the Google Wave server. Immediately this hit the blogosphere with a post by theNextWeb. During the presentation they indicated that they would open the federation server up later that day (that day being Friday, 30 Oct) if there were no problems. At the time of this blog post I have seen no indication that they have opened up a port yet. However, it should be safe to assume that will happen sometime this week.

This is great news for those of us that have been playing with the server. It is one thing to build a server and federate with your buddies. But it is quite another to federate with the Google server. This will mean that I can send Waves to myself from my Google Wave account and receive it on my server. Or, if you signed up on the PygoWave server you can send stuff back and forth. All this gets us closer to being able to build and host business wave servers. Which, to my thinking is the real important part of this whole technology. To bring Web 2.0 to business (how I describe Google Wave) you need to be able to host a wave server.

Great news moving forward! I am really looking forward to linking into the Google server! Are you?

To read the technical background look at the White Paper about the Google Wave federation architecture.

2009-11-02 UPDATE:

Google Developer Blog just posted the following: WaveSandbox.com: Federate This, announcing the opening of the Developer Sandbox for federation.

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I watched this video of Gravity and was simply blown away. This is the best example I have seen, to date, of what Google Wave is.Clearly, what it is not is a replacement for this and that (Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, etc). What it is, is the most awesome business collaboration tool ever developed! It is basically Web 2.0 for business…finally, BTW.

I have taken this description of Gravity right from their site and it reads as such:

Gravity is a prototype developed by SAP Research in Brisbane, Australia and SAP NetWeaver Development providing real-time, cloud-based collaborative business process modelling within Google Wave. We have embedded Gravity as a Google Wave “gadget” that can be added within the Google Wave client. Leveraging the collaborative features of Google Wave, all business process modelling activities get propagated in near real-time to all other participants of the Wave. In addition, participants of the Wave can use all other features provided by Google and its developer community to enrich the collaborative modelling experience.

Now watch this video. After you will understand the unbelievable power/promise that Google Wave can bring to the business world. I say again, it is not for somebody who has 25,000 followers. It is for serious folks trying to do real world problem solving via collaboration…i.e the grown-up side of Web 2.0.

Finally, Web 2.0 for business has arrived and I cannot think of a better example, to date, that truly shows that power it could bring to business. This is just one collaborative process that take’s place in the business world. Typically, this model would have to be built by one person, passed around and reviewed by peers and then the changes recommended by those peers talked about in a meeting. Then the changes agreed too implemented. Then the new model sent around again for concurrence and acceptance.

Again, I emphasis, this is one example of similar type tasks that take place everyday in the business world. The game changing promise that Google Wave brings to business is just amazing and this video highlights that perfectly!

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