Amit from Joomlatools contacted me to introduce me to their new company as well as their new product, Nooku.  The introduction is somewhat ironic given the fact that Johan already contacted me last Spring.  I have also had a link to Joomlatools' blogs in my Blogroll for a number of months!

However, it sounds like they're doing exciting stuff over at Joomlatools that should make quite a bit of the Joomla! community happy.  Nooku looks like a great product and the extension/framework should help Joomla! 1.5 users create multi-lingual websites more easily. I wish the best for Joomlatools.

The following is a copy of the email Amit sent to CMS Report.

Hello,

We wanted to introduce ourselves to you & the Joomla community.  We are a new company called Joomlatools, focused on building applications for Joomla users that want professional, extendable open source extensions.  All of our extensions will be built from the ground up with lots of user feedback, tried and tested by real customers and professionally written by folks who helped create Joomla!

The November 1st issue of the Wall Street Journal has an interesting article regarding Netlog.com (formerly Facebox). The article is titled, "How Netlog Leaps Language Barriers".

The article focuses on the diversity challenges that social networking sites have in Europe with Europeans speaking more than a dozen languages. Netlog appears to have stepped up to the cultural diversity challenge and is doing so at a much lower investment cost than its rivals. Netlog's secret weapons: the use of open source tools (apparently the site runs on PHP, MySQL, Ajax, etc.) as well as an army of foreign students at a nearby Belgian university.

By relying on some clever technology and a ready supply of foreign students at a nearby university, Netlog has become a veritable Tower of Babel. It counts 28 million members and has versions in 13 different languages, including French, German and Italian, as well less common tongues like Romanian and Norwegian. Polish and Russian versions are nearly finished and another dozen languages, including Catalan, Estonian and Arabic, are on the way.

That is a notable achievement, because outside of North America, many Internet start-ups are hemmed in by linguistic barriers that limit their ability to attract users and generate revenue.

I applaud Netlog's forward-thinking to build from the ground-up a multi-language content/social management system. More interesting is that while Netlog's developers understood what was at stake, the much larger U.S. social networking sites have been hampered by not thinking on more global terms.

pTools has today announced that the latest release of its Content Management Software,  pTools for Microsoft SharePoint, will be showcased in November at Microsoft's Tech-Ed Forum in Barcelona.

This beta release of pTools 5.4 is the latest update of pTools S5 (System Five) Content Management Software.

pTools for Microsoft SharePoint extends core CMS functionality to enhance SharePoint content management deployment and to integrate content management tasks easily within a single application user interface and content repository.  pTools S5 has recently been deployed in large scale deals for customers including Allianz, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Irish Stock Exchange.