- Mobile AJAX pondered
- Visual Studio 2008 performance cited
- DEMOfall asks startup company to leave show
- No, not another Microsoft killer
- Microsoft open source efforts noted
- Enabling technologies have their day, too, at Demo
- DEMO startups say it's all about community -- Ugh!
- DEMOfall launches with video innovators
- GPLv3 shunned, survey says
- Coming up: DEMOfall 07 live blogging
September 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)
A workshop on mobile AJAX was being held Friday at Microsoft offices in Mountain View, Calif., convened by the World Wide Web Consortium and OpenAjax Alliance.
While the meeting was not open to the press, participants were to explore user and industry use cases and challenges around AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) on mobile devices. They also were to examine what types of applications are expected to succeed in mobile environments. OpenAjax Alliance, for its part, has formed a task force to study mobile AJAX.
Standardization also was to be a focus of the event. Among the participants submitting position papers included organizations such as AOL, Dojo Foundation, Harvard Medical School, IBM, Microsoft and Sun Microsystems.
Posted by Paul Krill on September 28, 2007 03:36 PM
September 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Visual Studio 2008 performance cited
Microsoft's upcoming Visual Studio 2008 development tools platform, formerly codenamed "Orcas," is set to offer performance improvements in common scenarios, a Microsoft official said in his blog on Thursday.
S. "Soma" Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Developer Division, cited the new LINQ (Language Integrated Query Facility) as one area where performance is key. But LINQ is not out-performing in every case.
"In our testing, LINQ does in fact out-perform SqlDataAdaptor on almost every test case we tried, and in many of the exceptions, it is no more than 10 percent slower than using a SqlDataReader to accomplish the same task. Given the power of LINQ, we feel this is a very reasonable trade-off," Somasegar said.
Performance improvements for multi-core hardware also is a focus. In other improvements, rebuilding a Visual Basic project and running a background compiler is three times faster and uses three times less memory, Somasegar said. Scrolling of large C# files also is faster, as is typing in new text.
Response time for IntelliSense with large types in C# is as much as 10 times faster, he said.
Incremental build times are faster on C++/CLI projects, Somasegar said. TFS (Team Foundation Server) Version Control command processing was re-written to support unlimited size operations on key commands sans being memory-bound on the server, he said. Commands run 10 percent to 60 percent faster with the larger improvements associated with bigger projects.
Visual Studio 2008 is due for release later this year.
Posted by Paul Krill on September 28, 2007 12:21 PM
September 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
DEMOfall asks startup company to leave show
A scheduled presenter, mEgo at the semi-annual DEMOfall conference was summarily thrown out after it was learned that the company broke the rules by unveiling its product two weeks early at the TechCrunch40 conference.
And, because they violated their contract, the $18,000 entry fee was not returned, according to a DEMO spokesperson.
Well, don't do the crime if you can't do the time, as they say.
Presenters at the show sign an iron-clad agreement to embargo their product until the show. As a reporter, I know I am warned, within an inch of my life, that I had better not break the embargo.
mEgo received many warnings, according to the DEMO spokesperson, but chose not to pay heed.
While this may not qualify as a controversy, some do say mEgo still should have been allowed to present or have their money returned. I am not in that camp.
Here's a video interview of mEgo at TechCrunch40 when they actually launched their product.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on September 26, 2007 01:11 PM
September 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
No, not another Microsoft killer
What would DEMO '07, or any high tech show for that matter, be without loud music and a light show for the daily opening of the conference? DEMOfall could do no less.
But once the noise and flashing lights stop, the hope is always that it will be followed by something more original. Wednesday morning's demos lived up to my high standards.
The first group of presenters offered tools for organizing and running meetings, in effect making them more efficient.
Unfortunately, the enablers are not responsible for the content and so no one has figured out how to make those meetings more interesting, at least not at this year's DEMO.
First up was Tungle, a company with a lightweight plug-in for calendaring.
As skeptical as I am over yet another calendar applet, this one is pretty interesting. It is compatible with Exchange and Outlook now and will be compatible with Google Calendar and Lotus Notes later in the year.
Tungle puts your contacts, preloaded with your Outlook contacts, in an am IM-like list that indicates if the other users have the Tungle plug-in or not.
When you select a name to invite to a meeting, if the user doesn't have Tungle, he or she will receive a pop-up asking if they will accept the invite and if they would like to download the plug-in.
Tungle users can see availability of other users deploying a peer-to-peer network topology and can also create what CEO Marc Gingras called a Tungle Space.
Tungle Space allows the originator of the meeting to go to his or her calendar and highlight a time space for meeting availability. When you send a message to someone else, they see the available time space and can fill in the time they would prefer for the meeting. The time space is updated until everyone invited to the meeting can find a mutually agreeable time.
Mark Dzwonczyk, president and COO of Vello, a phone conferencing solution, was next up, and this solution is definitely worth a second look.
For me, the aha moment came when I realized that Vello calls the user when the phone conference is about to start rather than the user having to find the conference call-in number and place the call himself.
A Vello user simply adds the names of all the people expected to participate, creates a group name, and clicks to call.
In a demo at the show, Dzwonczyk called 68 audience members whose phone numbers he had gathered the evening before. With one click, all the cell phones in the audience started ringing.
So much for complying with executive director Chris Shipley's request to be courteous and "please turn off your cell phone."
Vello users can drag and drop the names of people into groups from Outlook and other contact applications.
What makes it all worthwhile is that conference calls will surely start on time because all participants are called at the same time.
If a user's cell phone service drops them from the call by mistake, any participant can simply call 888 MyVello to be reconnected.
Next up was a company called Tubes Network. This company offers a solution for sharing any kind of content, such as documents, photos, and video.
The desktop icon/visual is neat. It uses the idea of a pneumatic tube as used by banks at drive-up windows to send stuff to the teller. A bit old-fashioned, but for me, the image works.
So users simply place any kind of content inside the tube, click "send ," and the tube is delivered to everyone in the designated group, according to CEO John van Siclen.
Users are not accessing anyone else's hard drive, the content lives on a hosted server run by Tubes.
Tubes can also be made public allowing users to share pics and videos with the world.
The next company, InstaCall, will probably have the Microsoft lawyers working overtime.
Its founder, Sabeer Bhatia, claims InstaCall is "deconstructing Microsoft Office one application at a time."
InstaCall is actually a live document sharing solution that can create a Flash-based application that looks just like any Microsoft Office app.
It starts with the idea of sharing and managing docs by installing a tool bar in Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. Users click on the file which makes it a shared document.
When a user receives a copy of the document any changes made are immediately synchronized on the server. When the originator opens the the document they will see the updated version.
From the tool bar discussion and chats can be added around the document.
Here's the kicker: If the recipient does not use Office -- which may become more prevalent as, ThinkFree, ZOHO and Google Apps and others start to encroach on the sacrosanct turf owned by Microsoft -- InstaCall will convert the application in to an XML document built using Adobe Flash.
Bhatia claims the Flash version will have "complete feature compatibility with Office 2007." Pretty amazing if true.
And so it goes.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on September 26, 2007 11:03 AM
September 26, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft open source efforts noted
Many may believe Microsoft is against the open source movement. But a Microsoft official at the AJAXWorld conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Tuesday argued differently.
Just look at the company's direction with AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), where the company has endorsed open source, according to Microsoft's Joe Stagner. His title is listed as "Opinionated Misfit Geek" on his business card.
"We ship our entire AJAX stack completely as free, open source, licensed under a permissive license," Stagner said.
"Whoever thought Microsoft would ship open source products and not charge for them," Stagner asked.
Also, Microsoft is offering API-level and technical support to the open source Moonlight project, Stagner said. Moonlight is an effort to port Microsoft's new Silverlight multimedia client technology to Linux.
Microsoft also has a deal with Novell for interoperability between Linux and Windows, he said. (That deal, however, in which the two companies exchange monies and agree not to sue each other's customers, has drawn the ire of the open source community.)
Speaking about AJAX, Stagner said the big deal about AJAX is not that it is new technology, but that there is a new perspective on it that problem-solvers bring to the table.
"For me, AJAX is about what kind of applications we can build with this technology that we couldn't build with traditional click and page navigate mechanisms that we've been using to build Web apps for quite some time," Stagner said.
Meanwhile, AJAX has multiple definitions, he said. "I went to, I don't know, four or five sessions yesterday and I think I heard four or five different explanations of what AJAX was," Stagner said.
What AJAX is can depend on perspective. Someone who works at Oracle may see AJAX as a way to expose operational data, he said.
AJAX from Stagner's perspective is about factors such as a rich user interface, media enablement and animation. Standards-based federated logic also is part of the equation.
Posted by Paul Krill on September 26, 2007 06:41 AM
September 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Enabling technologies have their day, too, at Demo
Tuesday's afternoon sessions at Demo in San Diego offered up an instructive look behind the scenes at the enabling technologies that will drive high tech's future capabilities.
Jasper Wireless looks at the intersection of global economies and the proliferation of intelligent machines and offers an international platform for
connecting and managing networks, systems and cellular devices worldwide.
"One hundred and ten million machines now have the power to talk to one another," said Daniel Collins, CTO at Jasper.
What devices or machines talk about over cellular is not up to Jasper, rather its technology focuses on making the connections and delivering the content.
A centralized management console will allow managers to view a single dashboard no matter where in the world the devices or machines are located. Using the console a manager could deactivate a connected machine from thousands of miles away.
Jasper is a cellular provider with coverage in 35 countries.
Bringing it back home to the desktop Propel Software offers up a refreshingly easy to understand and practical technology.
The company's Personal Bandwidth Management [PBM] technology, dubbed Propel PBM, brings QoS [Quality of Service] to the desktop.
The problem it solves is focused on the rising tide of connected applications, such as Web 2.0 apps, SaaS, video, and gaming over the network. All of these applications are vying for the same limited bandwidth on the desktop.
David Murray, president and co-founder, demonstrated the technology by using a VoIP connection while simultaneously uploading a very large file. Without Propel PBM the VoIP connection was extremely poor and only by disabling the upload was the VoIP connection improved.
Murray ran the same demonstration after invoking Propel PBM and both the upload and the VoIP connection worked seamlessly.
Fusion-io is another enabling technology that will improve the performance i/o of storage systems, according to co-founders Rick White, CEO and David Flynn, CTO.
The product is ioMemory and it is basically a new storage architecture that puts 640GB of storage on a PC card using silicon instead of rotating disk technology.
The card can handle 100,000 seeks per second and in the demonstration moved the equivalent of 8 DVDs in 40 seconds, all eight were done simultaneously.
"ioMemory is 1000 times faster than a hard drive," said White.
White carried on to the stage a cardboard mock up of 100 hard drives in a box about six foot tall and compared it to the ioMemory card he held in his hand.
"It is a SAN in the palm of your hand," White said.
Remaining on the desktop, Qumranet Solid ICE product offers a fully integrated desktop virtualization product.
In the demonstration Solid ICE was used to manage three separate operating systems on a single desktop. New users can self provision a virtual desktop even to the extent of assigning memory and CPU power to each environment.
LogMein, read that Log Me In, already has 25 million users on the desktop. The company announced at Demo a mobile version of its technology for smart phones.
The product, Rescue plus Mobile, is delivered as a SaaS solution.
Michael Simon, CEO demonstrated how the technology can remote control a smart phone and troubleshoot typical cell phone application issues, such as inability to get onto corporate email.
The remote control system gives help desk providers a virtual image of the smart phone which allows them to use the cursor as the user might use the stylus to navigate the device.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on September 25, 2007 03:57 PM
September 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)
DEMO startups say it's all about community -- Ugh!
Okay, like everybody else I have a limited amount of patience. Well, unfortunately for Advanta and Spigit I'm all out.
I guess you could say I just don’t get it.
Advanta has something called IdeaBlob, a community site for posting business ideas.
Okay, number one, who is this community? Sounds like something out of that great British TV series the Prisoner.
Advanta claims you will attract mentors who can help you with your idea.
The New York skeptic in me says it will attract people who will steal your idea if it is really good and or if there are actually mentors offering advice on your business idea I would imagine they will want a piece of the action before they deliver any meaningful advice.
In the demonstration the CEO suggested that you will get the advice you need. Rather I think you will get hundreds of useless comments and from these you will pick out the advice that you agree with anyway.
Okay, next up, Spigit, is another one of those sites that offers up "the wisdom of the crowd" as Paul Pluschkell, CEO put it.
Well, as a reader of history, I'm not sure the crowd is always wise.
I leave it to the reader to fill in the blanks here and come up with their own examples of the wisdom of the crowd being a very scary idea.
Nevertheless this idea of the wisdom of many persists on the Internet in these collaboration sites and it appears to be growing. Ugh.
Okay, maybe I'm out of patience because I don’t get it and I don’t believe it. Whatever.
Pluschkell says by using his analytics and evaluation engine the site captures comments and quantifies them bubbling up to the top what its engine considers the best ideas.
If I hear of one more company that bubbles the best ideas up to the top I'll scream.
This is a social collaboration platform according to the CEO which "gives structure to the process of collaboration."
Users actually get something akin to merit badges, like in the Boy Scouts, and if you earn enough badges you can launch a virtual IPO.
As skeptical as I am I am duty bound to tell you that SAP is one of the early adopters.
Okay, SAP could use a few good original ideas. Microsoft take note.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on September 25, 2007 10:38 AM
September 25, 2007 | Comments: (0)
DEMOfall launches with video innovators
The lights go down, the noise comes up, and Demo 07 is underway.
If the first few demonstrators are any indication, full video without stuttering, breakup, or out-of-sync sound and picture accessed over the Internet is on the way.
Now the TV moguls will have even more to worry about.
First up was Charles Oppenheimer, CEO of Digital Fountain, who demonstrated a new content delivery network using the company's Splash technology.
Oppenheimer never quite got around to explaining how it works but if the demo was a true indication of what it can do, it was pretty impressive.
Showing a surfing video with one percent data loss made the video hard to watch. Oppenheimer cranked up the video loss to 20 percent and at that point the video was unwatchable until Splash was turned on.
We in the audience were able to watch a full motion video that ran without a glitch.
Digital Fountain will launch and license the Splash technology in January.
MotionDSP did them even one better by improving a grainy, awful cell phone video into a very watchable, high quality video.
What the technology, FixMyVideo, did was quite close to what was always unbelievable when seen on television shows like CSI where a dark, impossible-to-see photo is made into something akin to an award winning picture of the bad guy.
FixMyVideo works by aggregating multiple frames to enhance each frame of the video. So, the technology takes a license plate number that may be hard to read in any one particular frame and searches for additional frames that add additional data to the original frame until the license plate number is indeed highly readable.
Among its investors, according to the CEO Sean Varah, is In-Q-Tel, the "independent investment arm of the CIA."
Independent of whom, I would like to know?
Finally, ClipBlast! introduced what it calls a Video Web Search Widget. Maybe ClipBlast! isn't another YouTube but the fact that they've been crawling the Web since 2004 and creating a master index of every video on the Web means they will either rival Google for video search capabilities or get bought.
Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on September 25, 2007 09:39 AM
September 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Just 6 percent of developers working with open-source software have adopted the new GNU General Public License version 3, an Evans Data survey has found.
Also, two-thirds say they will not adopt GPLv3 anytime in the next year, and 43 percent say they will never implement the new license. Almost twice as many would be less likely to join a project that uses GPLv3 than would be likely to join, Evans said in a statement released on Monday.
"GPLv3 is controversial because it imposes restrictions on what you can do with programs implemented under this license," said John Andrews, president and CEO of Evans Data in the statement. "Developers are confused and divided about those restrictions, with fairly equal numbers agreeing with the restrictions, disagreeing with them, or thinking they will be unenforceable."
Evans also noted GPLv3 has a clause forbidding licensees from bringing patent infringement lawsuits, directly attacking the recent Novell-Microsoft alliance. Seventy percent of the developers in the survey felt the alliance has been bad for the open-source community, according to Evans.
GPLv3 was released by the Free Software Foundation on June 29. The foundation cited improvements like copyright technology to provide uniformity in different jurisdictions and the ability to modify software on PCs or in household appliances.
Other findings in the survey of more than 380 open-source developers included:
* Lack of skills in an organization was called the greatest barrier to migration from Windows to Linux.
* The Apache Foundation was cited as the organization having the best open-source offerings.
* A third of open-source developers are building desktop applications.
Posted by Paul Krill on September 24, 2007 04:30 PM
September 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Coming up: DEMOfall 07 live blogging
InfoWorld Editor-at-Large Ephraim Schwartz is on his way to San Diego for DEMOfall, where he will blog live (sorta) from the show.
Check back here tomorrow... and see Ephraim's show opener, DEMOfall '07: Web 2.0 takes stage.
We'll also have videos hot off the show floor, all in our special show report, which will be live tomorrow at 3 a.m.
Posted by Mike Barton on September 24, 2007 12:06 PM
September 21, 2007 | Comments: (0)
The state of Califor-notification
If it weren't for California 1386 and ChoicePoint, would we all be talking so much about data breaches these days? Maybe, but maybe not.
I'll never forget writing that first ChoicePoint breach story back in mid-Feb. 2005. It was one of those news items that really made you scratch your head and question how much such an event could potentially impact your own life.
I remember wondering how long this type of thing had been going on, how few were actually being reported, and how long it would be until someone subverted my identity.
A hop, skip, VA vet debacle and TJX Companies later, the consumer data-handling topic couldn't seem more relevant.
As we sit here reading, tomorrow marks the deadline for the White House's mandate for federal agencies to clean up their own data processing and retention activities. Progress is arguably being made.
But if it weren't for 1386 -- which was first introduced by California State Senator Steve Peace in 2002 -- we might not even be focused on the problem.
(If you believe Wikipedia, it's interesting to note that Peace maintained a career writing, producing and acting-in the "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes" movie series, among others, before jumping into politics. I think we all dream of making such landmark civic and cultural contributions to society; don't we? I do!)
Anyway, California lawmakers are back at it, trying to lead the way. With some 38 U.S. states having followed suit and passed their own breach notification laws, now the Golden State gang has a new bill you might want to consider.
Earlier this month, California bill AB 779 was passed near-unanimously in both the State Senate and State Assembly, and it now sits on the Governator's desk, awaiting the prodigious force of his personal stamp of approval.
(779 was authored by Calif. Assemblyman Dave Jones.. considering Peace's former employment, you have to wonder, it couldn't be that Davy Jones, right? Though, he's from Sacramento, not Clarksville, apparently.)
At the center of the bill is a requirement that would force retailers like TJX Companies to reimburse banks and credit unions for any expenses those firms are forced to endure as a result of a data breach -- namely for re-issuing credit and debit cards to those customers whose accounts have been exposed. Sounds fair enough, and other states are again expected to follow suit.
Industry watchers of all sorts are taking interest in this one, as, if the law spreads a la 1386, it could truly force retailers to improve their operations. Consider, after all, that TJX reported increased in-store sales after its breach, despite all the media hooplah. (Although some believe the firm will cough up roughly $1 billion in penalties once all its class-action suits, etc. are resolved.)
Javelin Strategy Analyst Rachael Kim notes that 779-type laws could help advance the PCI DSS regulation, which is also aimed at helping card issuers force retailers to better protect account data.
"What I find particularly interesting is the fact that this particular bill actually codifies the PCI DSS, prohibiting retailers and other merchants from storing sensitive authentication data, in addition to requiring merchants to use strong encryption and access controls," Kim wrote in a recent blog post.
She continues:
"What I'd like to know is whether or not a PCI compliant merchant is provided with safe harbor -- meaning that if they are indeed compliant with the PCI standards but experience a security breach, they will not have to cover issuer costs of notifying customers and reissuing cards. This has not yet been clarified. In my opinion, a PCI-compliant merchant should not have to cover these costs, as they’ve been doing everything they can to protect customer data (after all, the PCI standards are data security 'best practices,' are they not?)."
It's certainly interesting food for thought.
In the end, it sounds like we have to thank our Californian neighbors for again leading the charge in this arena.
Meanwhile, I'm holding out for Hollywood to produce "Attack of the Killer Data Incident."
Posted by Matt Hines on September 21, 2007 12:29 PM
September 20, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Sun Microsystems's jMaki 1.0, an AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) framework providing a lightweight model for building JavaScript-centric, AJAX-enabled web applications, is set to premiere at the AJAXWorld conference in Santa Clara, Calif. next Tuesday.
Web 2.0 applications can be built via jMaki
Developers with jMaki can develop applications using Java, Ruby, PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) and Phobos. AJAX-style widgets from popular JavaScript libraries such as Dojo also can be used with jMaki.
The "j" in jMaki stands for JavaScript while "Maki" means wrap in Japanese.
Greg Murry, the Sun AJAX architect, writes about jMaki in his blog.
Posted by Paul Krill on September 20, 2007 04:40 PM
September 20, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Lawsuit filed over alleged GPL misuse
The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) announced Thursday it has filed the "first-ever" U.S. copyright infringement lawsuit based on a violation of the GNU General Public License (GPL) on behalf of its clients.
The two clients are principal developers of BusyBox, a lightweight set of standard Unix utilities commonly used in embedded systems. It is open source software licensed under GPL version 2. The suit was filed against Monsoon Multimedia, which SFLC said acknowledges use of BusyBox in its products but has not provided recipients with access to underlying code as required by the GPL.
Monsoon could not be reached for comment on Thursday. The lawsuit was filed in Manhattan Federal District Court on Wednesday, SFLC said. The complaint seeks an injunction against Monsoon and requests damages and litigation costs be awarded to the plaintiffs.
A copy of the complaint can be found here.
Posted by Paul Krill on September 20, 2007 03:40 PM
September 20, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Adobe Systems in a few weeks plans to release a second beta of Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), the company's technology for running Internet-based applications off-line.
It will feature user notifications, in which developers can include message pop-ups from the system tray, similar to the message pop-up when a new email is received.
The first beta of AIR was released in June.
Additionally, the next version of the Adobe Flash Player, codenamed "Astro," will offer better scripting performance and more speed, to improve video performance, according to Adobe.
Posted by Paul Krill on September 20, 2007 02:55 PM
September 20, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Xobni: Web 2.0 lipstick for MS e-mail pig?
Corporate e-mail users looking to leverage Web 2.0 functionality in Outlook may have an answer in startup Xobni, which presented its flagship solution, Xobni Insight, at the TechCrunch40 conference on Tuesday in San Francisco.
"That is a dumb-ass name," Guy Kawasaki offered during the feedback session. "Luckily it's clever, 'inbox' backwards, but man, if you paid 25 grand to a name lab for that, if I were an investor, I'd just shoot you."
Slavery to frivolous Web 2.0 naming conventions aside, Xobni expands on the admin assistant replacement proposition of Microsoft Outlook by filling the gap between current Outlook functionality and end-users' e-mail and contact management desires. Improving and automating integration between messages and contacts, Xobni Insight puts a social networking twist on the Microsoft e-mail client in the hopes of surfacing hidden value in historical messages and improving Outlook users' ability to stay on top of their e-mail communications game.
In addition to providing much needed message body search, the solution automatically extracts phone numbers from messages, threads conversations, organizes attachments and conversations by contacts, and, in the words of company co-founder Matt Brezina, "uses CCs to expose e-mail's hidden social network." The concept expands the notion of the address book beyond Outlook's Rolodex-of-business-cards metaphor and infuses it with profile information and statistics aimed at leveraging and developing relationships.
What is intriguing about Xobni Insight is that, rather than allow content -- i.e., messages, categories, and projects -- to be the de-facto engine driving messaging organization, it offers a contact-centric model of e-mail management that will likely prove highly beneficial to those who find Outlook's project functionality less intuitive than correlating communications with the people who send them.
Xobni is also part of an important shift in introducing social-networking technologies in the workplace in that it automatically exposes an already existent network personal to and inherently functional for the user. Rather than having individuals sign up for a profile platform that offers e-mail functionality and requires a forced transition period of social network aggregation and toolset adoption, it allows communication itself to drive networking organically, using a platform that -- for better or worse -- most corporate users are already bound to.
Where the solution may take the Web 2.0 model too far is in providing e-mail analytics for contacts. Meant to give users insights into how they and their contacts use their e-mail, such as providing fever charts of messages received throughout the day, the analytics functionality, merged with automated contact profiling, will likely blur the all-too-familiar border between productivity enhancement and invasion of privacy in the workplace -- especially given the inescapable hierarchical structure of corporate culture, as opposed to the more peer-based feel of opt-in social networking.
But what could be an intriguing development for Xobni is the promise of future functionality for integrating data from IM and the Web. The upside of a central repository for varying modes of communication is easy to see. And if data associated with Web-based productivity apps can be pulled into the e-mail client in a worthwhile and intuitive way, e-mail as the hub of relationship-based collaboration, including hooks into workflow, documentation, and collaboration tools, could be inviting. Especially to organizations already appropriating their e-mail platform as an under-featured work portal anyway.
For all its promise, Xobni is, however, one clever Outlook upgrade away from the toilet of intriguing startup ideas. And though the company road map includes support for additional e-mail platforms in the future, the end game here appears to be to keep far enough ahead of Microsoft's messaging and collaboration development efforts to force an acquisition.
More TechCrunch40 coverage:
• TechCrunch40: Startups gone wild
• TechCrunch40: Learning from legends
• Mobile virtualization gets smart
• Google rep glib on enterprise play
Posted by Jason Snyder on September 20, 2007 12:34 PM
September 19, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Microsoft's secret desktop plan?
IBM's announcement of Lotus Symphony yesterday gave me a wicked '80s flashback. In my mind's eye I saw the original Lotus Symphony office suite, flickering on an amber monochrome monitor, boring me to tears as a New Order dance track thumped in the background.
The new Symphony comes with a different soundtrack: the drumbeat of challengers marching on Microsoft Office. The Symphony suite unveiled by IBM yesterday as a free download is actually a gussied-up version of OpenOffice, the open source productivity suite –- kinda like Sun's StarOffice, now offered for free as part of Google Pack. Could it be a coincidence that on the same day Google CEO Eric Schmidt talked up the forthcoming presentation component of Google Docs?
So let's see: We have OpenOffice permutations advancing on the desktop plus Google Apps, Zoho, Zimbra, and several other contenders making a flank attack through the browser. ODF, OpenOffice's native document format, continues to gather steam, while earlier this month the ISO voted against fast-tracking approval of Microsoft's competing OOXML document format. Not to mention that the Office clones look and feel more like earlier versions of Office than Microsoft's 2007 version and its revamped UI.
Yet in Redmond the guns remain eerily silent, to the point where I'm beginning to wonder if Microsoft isn't up to something. Ask the company, and all you get is the usual defensive posturing. Yesterday I spoke with Jacob Jaffe, Director, Microsoft Office, who –- surprise! –- claimed the recent surge of competitive activity doesn't bother Microsoft at all. Not one bit! Customer satisfaction is booming. The company sold more than 71 million licenses in the last fiscal year, for heaven's sake.
You want SaaS (software-as-a-service), a la Google apps? Microsoft goes one better: software plus services. As an example, Jaffe noted you can call up help within an Office application and get helpful content from Microsoft via Office Online. Whoa! Nobody could have imagined that back in the Devo era.
In only one case did I get beyond the stonewalling: when I broached the subject of desktop virtualization. Lately it has occurred to me that Microsoft's lack of a serious SaaS play could be indicative of some secret desktop virtualization plan –- where Microsoft streams Office and Windows in their entirely to a desktop or terminal near you, no funky AJAX compromises required. Would Jaffe rule that out?
"I’ve got nothing specific to announce at this particular point in time," replied Jaffe. "But I do think it's important to reinforce that when we think about services, we think about it in the broadest context, not that services equals Web browser only.”
Sounds like Redmond-speak for "watch this space" to me. I know that Microsoft takes the "services wave" seriously, but as far as SaaS is concerned, the company has barely showed up to the party. But with its SoftGrid acquisition, Microsoft is leading the desktop virtualization field.
Next week Randy Kennedy (who also has something to say about Symphony today) will be exploring this angle in his in-depth comparative review of SoftGrid, Symantec SVS Pro, and Thinstall Application Virtualization Suite.
I like the '00s. They're a lot more exciting than the '80s.
Posted by Eric Knorr on September 19, 2007 09:24 AM
September 18, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Google rep glib on enterprise play
Placed before a Web-believin' audience at TechCrunch40 today to present Google's much-anticipated Docs presentation capabilities, Jennifer Mazzon (pictured), product manager of Google Docs, parried questions about Google's ongoing enterprise agenda with a wave of the hand and a series of telling shrugs.
Asked about the security, reliability, and functionality reservations of enterprises considering a SaaS-based productivity app such as Google Apps Premier, Mazzon responded with the very consumer-oriented slant that Google has thus far been hard-pressed to shed in marketing its products to companies.
Concerned about the security of your productivity assets hosted at Google?
"Change your passwords, and make them good," Mazzon said. "Ultimately, your own security is your [own responsibility], just like your stuff on your own computer is one password away."
Wondering why you can't yet shake your Excel addiction in favor of a more beefed-up version of the comparatively lightweight Google Spreadsheets offering?
"In general, we did not design Google Docs for the power user who is very [adept] in spreadsheet usage," Mazzon said.
How about backup reliability?
"Nobody yet has lost their documents," Mazzon quipped.
The key issue here is, of course, a lack of commitment to the kinds of SLAs (service-level agreements) enterprises have come to rely on, if only as a reputable stamp of accountability. And Google appears reluctant to ante up its end of such contractual concerns anytime soon.
"We do have user agreements that people sign and we absolutely feel very strongly that people's assets that they put into Google Docs are precious and theirs and we need to enable them to get to them," she said.
In short, Google will continue to try to do its best.
Or, as we've seen in the recent Capgemini announcement, consultancies will do it for them.
Either way, integrating online tools into a hybrid productivity model will likely prove the not-too-distant enterprise norm, especially as Microsoft continues to lag in providing the kind of lightweight online capabilities many departments are currently seeking from IT.
And, with Yahoo's acquisition of Zimbra yesterday, the competition is certainly heating up.
Asked about the impact the Zimbra acquisition will have on Google's Web app lead, Mazzon was not unsurprisingly vague.
"The Internet is a big place," she said, admitting to the triteness of her evasive response. "There are a lot of users in the world, and competition makes everyone better."
More TechCrunch40 coverage:
• TechCrunch40: Startups gone wild
• TechCrunch40: Learning from legends
• Mobile virtualization gets smart
• Xobni: Web 2.0 lipstick for MS e-mail pig?
Posted by Jason Snyder on September 18, 2007 11:56 AM
September 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)
TechCrunch40: Learning from legends
A panel of startup icons proffered advice and anecdotal wisdom to an audience of upstart hopefuls today at the TechCrunch40 conference in San Francisco, much of which centered around the essentials of leadership in transitioning from concept to phenomenon.
David Filo (left, co-founder of Yahoo), Chad Hurley (center, co-founder of YouTube), and Marc Andreessen (right, founder of Netscape and Opsware and co-founder of Ning) joined moderator Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital in a candid conversation regarding the difficulty and excitement of building a tech company in the Valley from the ground up.
Each noted the point of inflection from fledgling operation to full-on marketable organization as the most trying time. And when asked for advice regarding ensuring a successful transition, Andreessen went right to the importance of having executive leadership on board from the get-go.
"Have a founder who can be a CEO," Andreessen advised.
Conceding examples of startups that hired CEOs later in the maturation process to significant success, including Yahoo, Andreessen said, "There are many many many startups where there was no CEO on the founding team, where a professional CEO was hired and tubed the company."
And what makes CEO material?
"The CEO's job is a never-ending stream of bad news," Andreessen noted. "You have to be able to absorb all that bad news and actually act on it without ever letting anything get to you emotionally."
The vitality of leadership in ensuring a successful startup pits Andreessen against the commonly held belief that CEOs are overvalued financially at most organizations.
"I have a contrarian view on CEO compensation," Andreesseen said, "which is it's well-deserved because the level of stress that those people are under is not something most of us would want to put up with."
Yet for those striking out on their own, at least initially, there really isn't any compensation to debate about, only the unmistakable need for someone to step into that executive role. For YouTube, it was Hurley.
"You try to make that transition from the one building the product to building the business. That was the biggest thing I had to do," said Hurley, who attributed inexperience as the secret to his success in making YouTube work.
"Because I didn't know what I was doing, we were able to do things a little bit differently," Hurley said, adding that assembling the best team is the chief responsibility of the corner office, whether it's in a garage or on the 75th floor.
"If you do get the right people in place, you're able to survive," he advised.
When it comes to hiring, Andreessen offered some colorful advice.
"Beat off with a stick as hard as you can, hiring too many people too quickly," he said. "Until you feel like you've achieved product/market fit, keep the team sizes as small as possible."
Hurley concurred that small teams improve a company's ability to adjust to fluctuations in fast-moving fledgling markets. Yet he conceded that a thin roster in the face of fast-scaling opportunity was what ended up sealing YouTube's acquisition fate -- by all means a success, but for someone dedicated to venturing out on his own, a difficult choice to make.
"If we had had more people on board [at the time] we were acquired," Hurley began when asked about regrets before leaving the rhetorical essentially unfinished.
Google ghosted its way into another thread about company fate and decision-making.
"We never really understood the opportunity we had ahead of us," Filo said, waxing nostalgic for the turmoil and excitement of the early days at Yahoo.
"We certainly made a lot of decisions over the years that didn't have the right long-term focus," Filo confessed. "Compared with some of our competitors at that time, we thought we were making long-term decisions, but we still were ... too focused on the short-term things and not building the right products, the right platforms, the right business structure to really get us through the next 10-plus years."
Yet when you're starting a company as an alternative to completing your Ph.D. in part because your advisor left for sabbatical, how tough can you be on yourself for not taking a 10-year view from the outset.
That said, the stakes are high in the Valley, and with the likes of Google down the street to contend with, the ability to read the long-range possibilities of markets as they emerge is essential.
For example, Web apps?
Perhaps the fact that Yahoo's announcement of its Zimbra acquisition coincided nearly exactly with Filo's admitted regret wasn't coincidence after all.
More TechCrunch40 coverage:
• TechCrunch40: Startups gone wild
• Mobile virtualization gets smart
• Google rep glib on enterprise play
• Xobni: Web 2.0 lipstick for MS e-mail pig?
Posted by Jason Snyder on September 17, 2007 08:26 PM
September 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Mobile virtualization gets smart
Desktop virtualization has a new form factor for delivery, the smartphone, thanks to Israel-based Ceedo Technologies, which today announced its Ceedo Mobile initiative at the TechCrunch40conference in San Francisco.
The initiative holds promise in enabling road warriors to carry enterprise applications and data on smartphones and then access those assets as needed through a virtualized environment that boots automatically when their mobile devices are hooked up to a host PC via USB.
Ceedo Mobile leverages the PC as an interface between worker and phone, thereby tapping the PC's connectivity and RAM. Moreover, all activities performed through the virtualized environment are cached to the mobile device's flash memory, enabling workers to eject the device when finished and leave no trace on the host PC.
The solution currently works only with Windows.
Although bundling virtualized applications on USB flash drives is nothing new, doing so on the flash drive of a smartphone opens up the portable virtualized app environment model to compelling possibilities.
Enabling mobile workers to perform and cache lightweight tasks on phones and leverage the PC environment in a completely secure manner when their work requires heavier resources, such as when a sales order must be processed, will surely prove enticing to today's increasingly mobile enterprises.
More TechCrunch40 coverage:
• TechCrunch40: Startups gone wild
• TechCrunch40: Learning from legends
• Google rep glib on enterprise play
• Xobni: Web 2.0 lipstick for MS e-mail pig?
Posted by Jason Snyder on September 17, 2007 04:59 PM
September 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Zimbra succumbs to acquisition fever
For awhile I've felt that Zimbra(the company and the e-mail app) was one of the coolest things going. The CEO, Satish Dharmaraj, invented JSPs while working at Sun; the CTO, Scott Dietzen, was one of the best technical minds and spokespeople BEA ever had. Their software is a terrific, open source e-mail server with a browser-based AJAX client that's also a collaborative document management system sporting all sorts of XML goodies, including Zimlets, little widgets for lightweight integration with other systems.
Now comes the news that Yahoo has bought Zimbra for $350 million. After Zimbra landed a big deal with Comcast in May, followed by a claim just last month that Zimbra had "more than nine million paid mailboxes," I actually thought this startup was going to go it alone. Perhaps it was an acquisition play after all.
My first thought: Doesn’t Yahoo already have a great AJAX e-mail client? It lacks the document management and integration capabilities of Zimbra, so I suppose Yahoo figures those added capabilities will open new doors. And unlike Yahoo Mail, the Zimbra client can run offline. In his blog today, Dharmaraj explained that Yahoo was acquiring Zimbra "to extend its email leadership to the university, business, and ISP markets."
On the one hand, I’m delighted Zimbra's killer UI and spiffy development environment will reach a wider audience. On the other hand, does Yahoo really know what to do with a business-oriented SaaS (software-as-a-service) application? As Michael Arrington speculates in TechCrunch, perhaps Yahoo's next target is Zoho, a purveyor of MS Office-like, browser-based productivity apps (which also recently gained the offline capability). With Zoho and Zimbra under its belt Yahoo can then make a full assault on Google Apps.
Makes sense. But the predictability of today's acquisition fever -- where so many smart, scrappy little companies are getting get gobbled by big ones that have a 50/50 chance of knowing what to do with them -- is actually starting to make me nostalgic for the random silliness of the dot-com boom.
Posted by Eric Knorr on September 17, 2007 03:59 PM
September 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)
TechCrunch40: Startups gone wild
Competing for not enough money to hire a midlevel developer to help realize their upstart visions, 40 startups will lift their shirts to an audience of VCs and the press at the TechCrunch40 conference today and tomorrow in San Francisco.
Much hyped and boasting concurrent announcements by former startup darlings AOL, Google, and Yahoo, the TechCrunch40 will award $50,000 to one of 40 presenters -- 39 of which were preselected by TechCrunch, the 40th being selected by DemoPit voting of conference attendees.
But the real reward for all participants is buzz -- and with attendance priced at an exorbitantly self-selective $2,000-plus, the chance to pitch their products and visions to a crowd that promises a high VC density.
Michael Arrington (pictured), founder of TechCrunch, wields the kind of startup kingmaker status that he admits has inspired more than one Valley CEO not receiving coverage on his blog to weep. Having bemoaned the need to release some hot air about the Web 2.0 bubble he sees brewing these days, Arrington and company have put together a compelling conference that pits five startups together to present and demo products and receive audience feedback.
The pitch and b*tch/critique sessions are grouped along Web product categories and include search and discovery, mobile and communications, community and collaboration, crowd sourcing, productivity and Web applications, revenue models and analytics, rich media and mashups, and entertainment.
Certainly many VC deals will be discussed at the conference. So too is the likelihood that, drunk on atmosphere and exuberance, more than a few of those will be misguided.
More TechCrunch40 coverage:
• TechCrunch40: Learning from Legends
• Mobile virtualization gets smart
• Google rep glib on enterprise play
• Xobni: Web 2.0 lipstick for MS e-mail pig?
[For a look at enterprise startups recently featured on InfoWorld.com, check out our Month of Enterprise Startups.]
Posted by Jason Snyder on September 17, 2007 09:35 AM
September 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)
BEA investor seeks company's sale
A BEA Systems investor is seeking the sale of the company, according to published reports in the San Jose Mercury News and the International Herald Tribune.
Investor Carl Icahn argues that it is difficult for a standalone company to prosper in the current environment. BEA officials last week in interviews with InfoWorld dismissed speculation about the company being up for sale. Such rumors have come up before, but the company has remained independent.
A BEA representative this morning told InfoWorld the company was not commenting on the matter but referred follow-up questions to another company representative.
In its most recent quarter, which ended July 31, BEA reported total revenues of $364.6 million, up 7 percent in the last year's second quarter. But license revenues of $123.1 million were down 9 percent from a year ago. Services revenue of $241.5 million represented a 19 percent increase from the same time last year.
Operating cash flow was $61 million.
BEA Systems is slated to move its corporate headquarters to a new building in downtown San Jose next year. The company last week at its BEAWorld San Francisco conference announced a new version of its WebLogic Server application server as well as an applications plan called Project Genesis.
BEA on Friday also announced that due to a delay in filing its Form 10-Q for the second quarter, it has received an Additional Staff Determination letter from the Nasdaq Stock Market stating that the company continues to be out of compliance with filing requirements of a marketplace rule. Because of this problem, BEA's common stock continues to be subject to delisting. The company previously has had problems of this nature, due to a stock option investigation.
Posted by Paul Krill on September 17, 2007 07:36 AM
September 13, 2007 | Comments: (0)
The latest fraudulent Bill Gates interview
Though he might be upset that he's the subject of a recent fake interview, Bill Gates can at least take solace in the fact that he's among some elite company in that regard.
The Microsoft founder joins Bill Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Alan Greenspan, Kofi Anan, and several others in being the "subject" of a fake interview written by ex-ABC News consultant Alexis Debat.
That's "fake" as in "utterly false." Not misleading, not out of context, not even an interview with the fake Bill Gates passed off as the real deal, but fake as in completely made up from top to bottom.
The magazine in question, Politique Internationale, has a solid reputation built off 29 years of top-notch reporting -- which makes this fake-interview scandal all the juicier. Politique Internationale has scrubbed all of Debat's articles from its Web site, but a cached copy can be found here (if you don't parlez-vous the Francais, you'll want to take that URL to Babelfish for a translation).
As for the content of the phony interview, it's fairly boilerplate stuff. Plugs for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the importance of vision and perserverence, and so on. There are detours into the world of politics that might have been noteworthy had they actually come from Bill Gates, and the "interview" closes with "Gates" comparing Microsoft and Google to David and Goliath. Curious as to which company is the giant and which is the plucky but determined underdog? Your French may be better than mine, but there's certainly wisdom to be found in Babelfish's profound Pidgin English translation: "B.G.: And Google, of course. That made odd be David vis-a-vis Goliath, for once!"
Of course, this isn't the first time somebody has made up an interview with Gates. Last year, respected Norwegian journalist Bjoern Benkow was accused of faking an encounter with Gates that became the basis of a magazine article.
Posted by Pete Babb on September 13, 2007 03:52 PM
September 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Dell takes storage fight to SMBs
Striding toward the podium to The Fabulous Thunderbirds' "Tuff Enuff," Dell Chairman and CEO Michael Dell laid down a gauntlet of sorts this morning at a launch event in San Francisco calling out the storage industry for failing to address storage concerns particular to SMBs.
"You can blame the storage vendors in the industry and say they really haven't met the unique needs of small and medium-sized companies, even as their storage needs have become more complex," Dell said to a crowd of around one hundred SMB organization representatives.
Describing a bleak low-end storage ecosystem of consumer-focused devices and overpriced enterprise-based solutions stripped down to SMB price points, Dell and Darren Thomas, general manager and vice president of storage at Dell, outlined the company's strategy for delivering simple, capable, and affordable storage solutions to smaller organizations in the face of the data deluge currently besieging IT.
Dell's proposed solution, the PowerVault MD3000i, is an iSCSI-based SAN, which Dell believes better suits smaller environments than competing offerings from Hewlett-Packard and IBM, built around the more expensive FC (Fibre Channel).
[For InfoWorld's full review of Dell's PowerVault MD3000i, see "Dell bulks up storage appliance."]
Putting what the company calls "server family values" to work, Dell hopes to leverage its installed base of PowerEdge server customers by offering a familiar interface and drives that are swappable across server and storage environments.
"If you've seen a PowerEdge server, you know what an MD3000i looks like before taking it out of the box," Thomas said.
According to Dell, the combination of interface familiarity and iSCSI gives the company a unique advantage in both removing the need for dedicated IT people at small organizations and optimizing the performance of the virtualized environments increasingly favored by midsize companies.
Coupled by Dell's PowerConnect series of switches, the PowerEdge/PowerVault combination presumably gives Dell the ability to offer SMBs a one-stop datacenter solution.
Dell's recently launched Vostro brand of notebooks and desktops, complete with support services, are also part of what appears to be a larger makeover of Dell since Michael Dell resumed the role of CEO earlier this year.
Dell has been aggressive in repositioning the company as a services and solutions provider, a strategy clearly targeted at the growing SMB market.
Whether this transition proves compelling depends in large part on the company convincing SMBs that widespread complaints about its customer service have been addressed -- and that it has put a year marred by safety recalls behind it.
In other words, can Dell, as The Fabulous Thunderbirds crooned, "put out a burning building / With a shovel and dirt / And not even worry / About getting hurt"?
Posted by Jason Snyder on September 10, 2007 03:28 PM
September 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Indecision in Redmond as Web apps charge
Today's Capgemini announcement that it will support Google Apps, following on the heels of last week's Office 2.0 Conference, is another milestone in the relentless march from the desktop to the Web.
No, Google Apps isn't going to replace Office anytime soon, at least not among ordinary cubicle dwellers. Even when Web apps gain offline capability, as Google Apps rival Zoho Office already has, power Office users will turn up their collective noses.
Yet the Enterprise 2.0 buzz is deafening. Why not incorporate the lightweight, collaborative advantages of Web 2.0 into enterprise desktop computing? Especially when by comparison SharePoint and Lotus Notes/Domino offer such clunky solutions. And especially when (so far, at least) Web-based productivity apps cost nothing or almost nothing, which may be the real reason so many enterprise customers were reportedly lurking at the Office 2.0 show.
I can only imagine the thrashing that must be going on in Redmond right now. Microsoft can't simply pretend the trend doesn't exist, which is why the company felt compelled to issue a non-announcement last week about a new installer that would automatically update Windows Live services along with Windows XP and Vista. But it has steadfastly refused to go the Web productivity app route (except for Live Writer, which is not a serious attempt at a Web-based word processor).
Yes, I understand Redmond's aversion to cannibalizing its Office cash cow, but the fact is that Redmond could own this new space if it wanted to. All it would need to do is push interoperability and integration between lightweight Web versions of Office applications and its desktop fatware. Advanced features would be absent from the lightweight versions, but the company could ensure any Office doc would load on the Web -- whatever new desktop service packs and upgrades might appear -- and online document management could be integrated with Windows for offline access.
Of course, Microsoft may already be laboring mightily to make something like this work. Knowing the complexity of the company's licensing schemes, maybe it's crunching the numbers right now – the free version, the not-so-free version, the doodads for a onetime fee, and so on. The recent report by The Burton Group, which claimed that swapping Microsoft Office for Google Apps would be "a career-limiting move," is right on target. On the other hand, if Microsoft fails to act decisively much longer, some Redmond careers might be shortened, too.
Posted by Eric Knorr on September 10, 2007 03:00 AM
September 07, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Indian outfit to offshore to U.S.
In a new twist to an overly familiar IT staffing model, Indian outsourcer Wipro has announced plans to open a software development center in the U.S, according to a report yesterday on NPR's Morning Edition.
Wipro's proposed Atlanta-based programming depot will hire 500 U.S. developers over the course of three years, Wipro officials said.
The announcement comes on the heels of Wipro's acquisition of U.S. services provider Infocrossing last month, as the company seeks to diversify its offerings and attain the market privileges of a greater global footprint.
In addition to providing the local presence that many potential outsourcing customers are demanding these days, Wipro believes that having American software developers on staff will improve the company's ability to deliver top-notch products to U.S. companies.
The announcement not only provides further evidence that Indian outsourcing firms are no longer content with the back-office status of years past but also indicates a potential shift in the mind-set of outsourcers seeking to expand their customer bases.
"Are you competing on a cost point of view?" asks Raja Viraswami, head of international HR at Wipro. "Or are you competing on an all-over perspective completely?"
Viraswami, who says American developers receive on average 10 times more pay than their Indian counterparts, believes States-based coders will provide Wipro with the cultural insights and intangibles necessary to satisfy U.S. companies' needs.
Moreover, the company, which employs developers in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Eastern Europe, and India, will be better positioned to take on U.S. government projects, as many -- mainly defense-related initiatives -- require the work not leave the country.
Posted by Jason Snyder on September 7, 2007 04:07 PM
September 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Beers vie for CPU-coolant title
Despite a seemingly multimillion-dollar ad campaign to convince the world that its mere presence can frost away the heat, Coors Light came in distant last in what amounts to the world's first International Beer CPU Coolant Competition hosted by the ever-curious folks at Tom's Hardware.
For those late to the beer-as-CPU-coolant craze, Shelton Romhanyi and company pitted Molson's Canadian Beer against three industry-leading CPU coolants and a diluted solution of antifreeze to determine the best means possible for cooling an overclocked CPU. Shocking to some, the flat, warm libation from the Great White North took home second place.
Not to be outpaced de facto by their Canadian co-workers, the folks at Tom's sites in Germany, Ireland, and the United States proferred their own quaffable contenders to attempt to knock Molson's off the block as the world's best beer CPU coolant.
Guiness, Franziskaner Hefe-weissbier, and Coors Light were put through the beer-bong-tubing CPU-cooling ringer to varying efficacy.
Viscosity may have played a role in Guiness's pasting of the pathetic showing of the American frost-brewed light. And the unfiltered yeast present in the Hefe-weissbier may very well have proved the key cooling ingredient in Franziskaner's tipping the CPU temperature scale further to the cool end of the spectrum than Guiness did.
And yet at the end of this installment, nothing cooled to the extent of the original, as Molson's remained the top beer for whisking CPU heat away.
Posted by Jason Snyder on September 6, 2007 12:18 PM
September 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)
The OpenAjax Hub, providing interoperability between AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) components made with different AJAX toolkits, is expected to be available this fall, an official with the OpenAjax Alliance said on Thursday at The 2007 Rich Web Experience conference in San Jose, Calif.
"OpenAjax Hub is a publish and subscribe engine, very small, which allows components to talk to each other on the same Web page," said Jon Ferraiolo, a Web architect at IBM who has been managing operations at the alliance. Featured in the alliance have been major vendors such as Sun Microsystems, Oracle and IBM.
"The main thing that [the hub] allows you to do is develop components in different toolkits," such as Dojo or Google Web Toolkit, Ferraiolo said. The technology is important for mashup widgets, he said.
The hub has been described as JavaScript functionality that would be integrated into AJAX toolkits.
Posted by Paul Krill on September 6, 2007 11:18 AM
September 06, 2007 | Comments: (0)
EMC ports data de-dupe to VMware
Trend toward server virtualization pushes storage software into VMs
In yet another move aimed at extending business-conscious storage management capabilities to customers capitalizing on the virtualization trend, EMC today announced plans to virtualize data de-duplication technology it brought on board with its November 2006 Avamar acquisition.
Whereas yesterday FalconStor proposed virtualized CDP (continuout data protection) as the less-muss means for preventing data loss in the event of server failure, EMC is betting that its Avamar Virtual Edition for VMware will provide significant cost savings to VMware-based enterprises by virtualizing backup and recovery.
The marriage of Avamar de-duplication functionality with the virtualization capabilities of VMware likely comes as little surprise to those attempting to make sense of EMC's spate of acquisitions in recent years. Worth noting, however, is what EMC's move to port Avamar technology to ESX Server may say about enterprise interest in supporting remote branches by fully virtualizing them.
Tapping client-based agents, EMC Avamar Virtual Edition de-dupes data at the source, cutting down the resources required to back up guests and systems. And by making this technology available to VMware ESX Servers as a virtual machine, EMC enables VMware-based organizations to tap the benefits of data de-duplication at remote sites without impacting their existing infrastructures and -- more importantly, for some -- without requiring dedicated branch-office IT staff, according to the company.
"Encapsulating the Avamar server in a virtual machine so it can sit on the same shared server and storage infrastructure that's deployed at remote branch offices allows you to completely eliminate the need to have separate management and hardware for backup and recovery," said Jed Yueh, founder of Avamar and now vice president of product management at EMC.
Although Yueh noted that this model would free enterprises from having to ship tapes from site to site for disaster recovery, it is more likely that the trend toward server consolidation already under way at many organizations is what will drive the demand for storage software delivered in virtual iterations.
EMC Avamar Virtual Edition is slated for general availability in November.
Posted by Jason Snyder on September 6, 2007 10:10 AM
September 05, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Company unveils VMware ESX version of its continuous data protection technology to stave off fallout of crashed guests and systems
More than just a means for reducing costs in the datacenter, virtualization is fast proving a force in redirecting the course of software delivery. Today FalconStor lent further credence to the growing industry mandate to support VMware by announcing a virtualized iteration of its IPStor product, thereby cutting down the cost and complexity of CDP (continuous data protection) in hybrid environments considerably.
Pre-built and pre-configured, FalconStor CDP Virtual Appliance for VMware installs as a virtual instance on an ESX Server in less than 10 minutes, according to the company. Supporting as many as 16 connections per virtual node, the solution brings the cost of deploying CDP below $10,000, company officials said.
Moreover, by virtualizing IPStor and mirroring both physical and virtual data sources, FalconStor believes its solution provides a means for eliminating mandatory restores, enabling backup devices to act temporarily as primary sources in the event of server or guest failure, and doing so without a hit to performance or loss of data.
The solution employs DiskSafe, an agent-based technology for backing up Windows environments, to automatically allocate resources on the Virtual Appliance equivalent in size to the primary source. DiskSafe then takes point-in-time snapshots as scheduled by the administrator and mirrors incremental block-level changes in real time to the Virtual Appliance. In the event of failure, the DiskSafe mirror can be assigned to a new virtual machine to restore services instantly, thereby providing continuous data availability, according to the company.
"Because we're doing this at the block level, we give you not only the data but the system data. So you can have a failure on a server -- physical or virtual -- and actually restore that entire server from the product, including all system-state information," said Diamond Lauffin, technology evangelist at FalconStor. "And because we monitor transactions down to the I/O level, you can snap back to a point-in-time snapshot and then roll forward up to an actual transaction, which could be down to a nanosecond."
By providing continuous data availability in a virtualized environment, the solution eases P2V (physical-to-virtual) conversions and eliminates the need to perform mandatory restores, according to the company.
"You can now use what would be considered your backup or CDP device as a primary device temporarily while you are repairing either a physical failure of a primary or a corrupted position on a primary device," Lauffin said.
Public demonstrations of FalconStor CDP Virtual Appliance for VMware will be performed at VMworld 2007, which will be held from Sept. 11-13 in San Francisco.
The release, which comes on the heels of VMware's recent IPO, may suggest that customers are pushing software vendors to support the VMware platform as their own virtualization initiatives take hold.
According to a report filed today on Newsday.com, company CEO and Chairman ReiJane Huai sold 12.5 percent of his FalconStor shares last Thursday, garnering $3.27 million. The report also notes that FalconStor Vice President Wayne Lam took home $1.45 million selling shares and exercising options last month, and that Bernard Wu, vice president of business development, netted $301,000 by selling 28,000 shares.
Posted by Jason Snyder on September 5, 2007 11:46 AM
September 04, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Mac fans, Lego is shaking a leg again. After rolling out a Intel-Mac version of Lego Mindstorms NXT robotics invention system, another Mac-fanboy move was made by PodBrix, which has delivered the Young Woz and Jobs Playset in Lego.
Get those orders in, if a must-have. PodBrix says the Young Woz and Jobs Playset is "a 300-unit limited numbered edition and features meticulous detail." There is no "sold out" sign for it today on the PodBrix site. It was released on 8/29/07.
Posted by Mike Barton on September 4, 2007 10:43 AM
September 04, 2007 | Comments: (0)
Web services policy spec advances
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on Tuesday issued what it described as a critical Web standard for extending Web services features and SOA applications.
The Web Services Policy (WS-Policy) 1.5 standard enables developers to meet requirements for secure transactions, reliable messaging, addressing of metadata and other scenarios in a modular fashion, W3C said. SOA developers can enable extensions to a service without disrupting or requiring changes to lower-level service descriptions. Extensions are defined by other specifications.
Now an official W3C Recommendation, or standard, WS-Policy 1.5 connects core Web services standards - SOAP 1.2, WSDL 2.0 and XML Schema - to a set of extensions.
The Web Services Policy Working Group, which oversees WS-Policy 1.5, features companies such as Adobe Systems, BEA systems, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.
The WS-Policy 1.5 - Framework document can be accessed here.
Posted by Paul Krill on September 4, 2007 08:57 AM
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