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May 07, 2007 | Comments: (0)
The UK: Home of open source innovation?
No, I'm not talking about Alfresco, my employer. I think what we're doing is exceptionally cool, but two other companies from the "island of shopkeepers" are pushing the envelope on innovation. They're not just bringing open source to existing markets, but actually building new markets with open source. Oh, and both are GPL, which makes me happy. :-)
The companies? Openads and GNU Radio.
What do they do?
GNU Radio is a collection of software that when combined with minimal hardware, allows the construction of radios where the actual waveforms transmitted and received are defined by software. What this means is that it turns the digital modulation schemes used in today's high performance wireless devices into software problems.What does this mean? It means an infinite number of things. The company builds very cool applications on top of this base functionality. Like the ability to track shoppers (via their mobile phones) as they walk through your store, helping you to optimize displays and what-not. That's just the beginning.
As for Openads, it has actually been around for six or seven years.
The Openads community has grown rapidly to become the web's largest ad space community. Tens of thousands of people are making their websites pay!Think Doubleclick. Then think about it completely free.The highly sophisticated and FREE Openads adserver software gives site owners everything they need to generate revenue from their websites. Publishers get complete control of banners and campaigns along with a highly sophisticated tracking system for gathering statistics, all from the one simple screen interface.
And that's when you smell the disruption, and it smells good....
I'm going to be interviewing the founders of both projects over the next few weeks, and will post more when I've done so. In the meantime, it's great to see innovation alive and well in open source land...and in the UK. Johnny Rotten was right - there really is anarchy in the UK. :-)
Posted by Matt Asay on May 7, 2007 09:22 AM
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You may want to check out UK-based Elgg as well. They offer one of the few open source SNS, targeted mostly at the learning space:
http://elgg.org
I've been a dedicated OpenAds(aka. PHPAdsNew) user for possibly over 7 years. It has never failed me, even when pushing over 7 million banners a month.
Although the product is certainly solid. It would be interesting to see how they flourish as a business. Currently, all I see offered are consulting services.
Since you are speaking with them, I would ask if they intend to provide a hosted solution. It would certainly add to their business, and likely scale pretty well.
Posted by: Roy Russo at May 8, 2007 05:48 AM
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