Today was a Good Day.

I went with Tashu, a friend and business associate, to the Drug Information association 40th Annual Meeting here in DC.

It was interesting. Since leaving Visual Analytics (I'll write about this in the near future) I've been working with Tashu and another new friend, Tom Rogers, on a start-up to address some issues in two areas: improving the quality and speed of conducting financial audits and the collection of pharmacological adverse events.

The DIA meeting was both instructive and interesting -- not to mention the excellent ratio of women to men. Being a technology guy, in an industry dominated by men, tech conferences have a much poorer ratio in this department... Let's hear it for the Booth Babes! ;-) But I digress.....

After the conference, we moseyed over to the National Air and Space Museum (ya just gotta love living in Washington, DC -- except during rush hour!) We needed to kill and hour or so before going to the monthly meeting of the MIT Enterprise Forum of Washington and Baltimore.

The Case Study company of the month was DataSource, Inc., a company transitioning itself from a services company, doing CMM Level 3 full life-cycle software development, to a product company.

They are about to release a "J2EZ" product that generates the "plumbing" for J2EE web services from a graphically-designed description of interconnected logical components (this from a short discussion with their CTO). It's an interesting application that I think will do very well in this market niche.

Hell, as a soon as it's available (early in July), I'll be heading over to their site to check it out. The tool allows a fairly inexperienced programmer to define and generate the very-difficult-to-create, repetitive minutiae that is much of J2EE development. It will allow a seasoned developer to skip the minutiae and go straight to the important stuff: solving problems for the customer.

The discussion revolved around the business decisions and challenges DataSource has faced, and will face, in its move toward a product-centric business model. The panel had a number of interesting insights on the process.

Plus, I got to rub elbows with some Washington area entrepreneurs. Cool.

So, I'd say: yes. Yes it was a Very Good Day.