Web 2.0 News Desk

US Start-Up Born to Make War on Junk Mail

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 15:28:00 EST

Just when the US Postal Service looks down for the count, a self-funded Seattle start-up called PaperKarma figures its destiny is to suppress junk mail on which the post office depends. The company was started by Sean Mortazavi, who hasn’t given up his day job at Microsoft yet, and PaperKarma’s sole employee Brendan Ribera. The pair has developed a free multi-platform mobile app that lets junk mail-inundated protesters take a picture of the junk mail flooding their mailbox, hit an “Unsubscribe” button and send it to PaperKarma. The start-up will automatically pass it on to the mailer with Federal Trade Commission-enforced instructions that the recipient be dropped from its mailing list. Mortazavi and Ribera reportedly spent a year collecting the names of the appropriate people at 10,000 of the biggest junk mailers such as the so-called privacy officers or customer advocates responsible for deleting names from mailing lists and its system automatically matches them to the e-mailed suppression request. It’s a system that’s constantly being updated and expanded.

Cisco Challenges EC’s OK of Microsoft’s Skype Acquisition

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 08:45:00 EST

Cisco Wednesday filed suit in the European Union’s second-highest court, the General Court in Luxembourg, challenging the European Commission’s rubber stamp last October of Microsoft’s $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype. Cisco says it isn’t opposed to the merger, but figures the EC should have put strings on its unconditional approval to ensure Skype’s standards-based interoperability with other systems like its own videoconferencing widgetry “to avoid any one company from being able to seek to control the future of video communications.” Messagenet, a European VoIP service provider, has joined Cisco in the appeal. The EC is expected to defend its decision and not give ground.

CRM at Its ‘Most Social’ and Nimble on Nimble?

Thu, 16 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST

Nimble, the social CRM platform has announced the launch of Nimble 2.0, billed as the “most social” CRM platform on the market today. Nimble was designed entirely with social CRM in mind and is the first social business platform that empowers companies with the ability to get closer to their customers through listening and engagement. Over the past year, Nimble has listened to the feedback of its community – many of whom are on the forefront of social business adoption – and incorporated it into Nimble 2.0 to make it easier, smarter and more flexible. New enhanced features such as social discovery, improved usability and marketing integration have all been added to the product.

EquaShip Sinks at Launch; Puts into Dry Dock for Repairs

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 07:45:00 EST

EquaShip, the ambitious start-up that wants to be the fourth US parcel carrier after UPS, FedEx and the USPS, has suspended its weeks-old service to regroup after it couldn’t get packages where they were going in a few days time. CEO Ron Wiener said it could take a year to fix the problem. Its failure to deliver within a closing time window put eBay and Amazon shippers’ critical performance scores at risk. The start-up has been courting the small and medium-sized B2C e-commerce merchants on Amazon and eBay that don’t qualify for FedEx and UPS discounts and are basically stuck subsidizing the unprofitable volumes of the FedEx and UPS mega-shippers. EquaShip’s low rates were supposed to make the discount-disenfranchised competitive so they could blithely offer the free delivery imperative to Internet sales these days without losing their shirt.

Assange Awaits Verdict on His Fate

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 05:00:00 EST

WikiLeaker Julian Assange could be on a plane headed for a jail cell in Sweden in a couple weeks if his two-day appeal to Great Britain’s Supreme Court this week fails. Assange claims the arrest warrant issued by Sweden’s public prosecutor instead of a judge has no weight and his lawyer reached back as far as the sixth-century Byzantine Codex Justinius to try to prove that the concept that “no one can be a judge in his own case” is a “fundamental principle.” Unfortunately for Assange prosecutors often play a judicial role in Sweden and elsewhere on the continent and Britain generally defers to other European systems.

Facebook Files To Go Public

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 04:00:00 EST

Facebook put in its papers to IPO after the market closed Wednesday, as expected. The S1 runs 200 pages. The S1 runs 200 pages. It’s supposedly looking to raise $5 billion, not the $10 billion expected, although that could change back to $10 billion by the end of this exercise. What tiny percentage of the company $5 billion or $10 billion might represent is unclear.

Facebook to File for Massive IPO: WSJ

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 13:00:00 EST

Facebook will put in its papers to IPO next week, according to the Wall Street Journal Friday, maybe by Wednesday February 1. Apparently the timing is still a bit up in the air but it’s in the works. The offering, looking to raise $10 billion, is supposed to value the company at somewhere between $75 billion and $100 billion. Britain’s Telegraph said PrivCo claimed Thursday night that Facebook was targeting an IPO price of $38–$40 for its shares, with a target value for the company of $90 billion–$95 billion because Facebook was “reluctant to aim for the full $100 billion valuation in the hope of leaving some value for investors following the listing.” Morgan Stanley is tipped to take the company out with Goldman Sachs, which orchestrated a sloppy $1.5 billion private placement of Facebook shares a year ago, getting a piece of the action.

Intel Names Brian Krzanich as COO

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 06:30:00 EST

Intel has named Brian Krzanich COO, the job CEO Paul Otellini got three years before being named chief executive. Otellini’s got to retire in four years when he turns 65 so Krzanich, 51, is being perceived as Otellini’s new heir apparent, replacing Sean Maloney, who had a stroke two years ago and is now chairman of Intel China. Patrick Gelsinger took himself out of the running in 2009 when he moved to EMC, where he will probably become CEO someday. Krzanich, who will report to Otellini, is responsible for worldwide manufacturing, the soul of Intel. As COO he will continue to oversee manufacturing and pick up responsibilities for internal IT and HR that used to belong to chief administrative officer and former CFO Andy Bryant who will move from being vice-chairman to full-time executive chairman in May. CFO Stacy Smith, 49, who previously reported to Bryant, will now report directly to Otellini. So will the head of technology development Bill Holt. Holt and Krzanich will continue to co-manage the Technology and Manufacturing Group and coordinate semiconductor process technology development and manufacturing. Kirk Skaugen, 41, head of Intel’s data center business, will now run the problematic PC Client Group (PCCG), succeeding Mooly Eden, who will be going back to Israel at his request as president of Intel Israel. Skaugen drove the center business to $10 billion last year and is now apparently supposed to apply a whip hand to the slower-growing, Apple-challenged PC sector. Skaugen and Eden report to Dadi Perlmutter, who runs Intel’s Architecture Group as Intel’s chief product officer, a promotion. CIO Diane Bryant will take over the data center business from Skaugen and report to Perlmutter too. Kim Stevenson, vice-president of IT global operations and services, will succeed Diane Bryant as CIO and report to Krzanich. The changes will take effect over the next 30 days.

Dell Stock at Center of Insider Trading Allegations

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 05:15:00 EST

In a move reminiscent of Raja Rajaratnam and his Galleon Group hedge fund, the FBI has arrested seven seemingly respectable Wall Street players that the US Attorney then charged with trafficking in insider information about Dell and Nvidia. They allegedly realized $61.8 million shorting Dell in 2008 and another $15.7 million illegally trading Nvidia for a total of nearly $78 million. The friends, described by the government as a “criminal club,” worked for five different hedge funds and investment firms. The SEC has filed parallel civil charges against them. Rajaratnam is now serving an 11-year prison term for illegally earning $75 million on dozens of trades executed over six years. The new crop of defendants was a lot more efficient. They include Anthony Chiasson, who co-founded the now defunct Level Global Investors hedge fund; Todd Newman, who used to head technology trading for the Diamondback Capital Management hedge fund; another former Diamondback employee Jesse Tortora; and Jon Horvath, currently employed at Sigma Capital Management, a unit of SAC Capital. Chiasson used to work at SAC too, which keeps coming up in these raids. Also arrested was Whittier Trust manager Danny Kuo, who joined the hedge fund in 2008. Spyridon Adondakis, a former junior analyst at Level Global, was also charged. The SEC said former Neuberger Berman investment analyst Sandeep Goyal worked at Dell in 2006-2007 and got Dell’s 2007-2009 quarterly earnings and other data from a Dell insider in its investor relations department and its corporate development office from March 2009 through April 2010. It could be the same person; it’s not clear. Goyal then tipped off Tortora who passed the information around to Newman, Horvath, Kuo and Adondakis among others. Adondakis allegedly gave the information to Chiasson.

Fabric Engine Boosts Node.Js Performance 25-Fold

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 13:20:00 EST

Fabric Engine, a software engineering company focused on bringing multi-threaded, compiled performance to web applications, has announced that its Fabric Engine server technology now supports Node.js, boosting its computational performance more than 25X. Fabric Engine has published the results of its performance benchmark online (http://fabric-engine.com/2011/11/server-performance-benchmarks/), and will be showcasing its support for Node.js at NodeJam this January. Fabric Engine is designed to tap into the power of modern, multi-core processing to bring true, multi-threaded, compiled performance to web applications. As web applications grow, they start to run into performance and scalability problems that dynamic languages like JavaScript are not well-suited to solve. Consequently, these applications need to be re-architected using compiled languages like C++, introducing significant costs to the developer. Fabric Engine gives the same performance as C++, yet retains the ease of use and speed of iteration of dynamic languages.

Yahoo Picks PayPal Chief for Its Next CEO

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 07:45:00 EST

Four months after canning Carol Bartz, its last CEO, Yahoo Wednesday morning named PayPal president Scott Thompson its fourth CEO in under five years. He starts January 9. Acting CEO Tim Morse will go back to being CFO. According to Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock, Thompson is expected to “restore the energy, focus, and momentum necessary to grow the core business and deliver increased value for our shareholders.” Yahoo shares dipped on the news. It will take Thompson, a technologist with no advertising, media or turnaround experience, a while to get up to speed. He said his “immediate focus will be on getting to know the entire team and hearing more from all Yahoos, working closely with the engineers and product teams, and diving deeply into our products and services to learn more about what our more than 700 million users find most engaging and useful. I will also be working directly with our region leaders and sales teams globally to get a clearer understanding of the needs of our advertisers and publishers. Clearly, speed is important but we will attack both the opportunity ahead and the competitive challenges with an appropriate balance of urgency and thoughtfulness. I cannot wait to get started.”

Computers Link WikiLeaks Chief to Source

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 06:00:00 EST

Two forensic investigators testifying for the US government told an Article 32 military hearing Monday that they had found evidence linking accused WikiLeaks source Pfc. Bradley Manning to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the Aussie who published the trove of sensitive classified diplomatic cables Manning allegedly slipped him. The evidence extracted from Manning's computers has him communicating with online chat users identified with aliases used by Assange including a text message on one of Manning's hard drives that reads: "You can currently contact our investigations editor directly in Iceland at 354. 862.3481: 24 hour service: ask for Julian Assange." There appears to be no proof Manning actually sent poached files, but the two men haven't been tied together before and their chats were about sending information via a secure connection. The evidence extracted from Manning’s computers has him communicating with online chat users identified with aliases used by Assange including a text message on one of Manning’s hard drives that reads: “You can currently contact our investigations editor directly in Iceland at 354. 862.3481: 24 hour service: ask for Julian Assange.” There appears to be no proof Manning actually sent poached files, but the two men haven’t been tied together before and their chats were about sending information via a secure connection. Despites attempts to erase them, copies of nearly 500,000 documents, most of which WikiLeaks published, were found on Manning’s computers. The computer records also have Manning confessing to leaking the sensational “Collateral Murder” Apache helicopter video released by Wikileaks in the spring of 2010 to a hacker in the US named Eric Schmeidl. That’s the second confession Manning allegedly made. The first one was to hacker Adrian Lamo, who turned Manning into the FBI. Wired, which was in on the Lamo leak, said that if the government can show that Assange directed Manning it “could complicate Assange’s defense that WikiLeaks is simply a journalistic endeavor.” The chat logs include a request to resend some unidentified data suggesting they had talked before. The Army hearing at Fort Meade where Manning is appearing for the first time since being thrown in an Army stockade last year is supposed to determine whether he will be court-martialed on an assortment of 22 charges including aiding the enemy. The 24-year-old soldier could face the death penalty or life imprisonment As for motive, he apparently sent WikiLeaks message saying, “You might need to sit on the information for 90 to 180 days to figure out how to best send and distribute such a large amount of data to a large audience. It is possibly one of the most significant documents of our time, removing the fog of war and revealing the nature of 21st century asymmetric warfare.” Despite encryption Manning used the password “TWink1492!!” also used as an encryption key making it easy for the investigators. Other files were erased and couldn’t be recalled. Assange has been resisting extradition to Sweden on morals charges supposedly in part because he’s afraid he’ll be extradited in turn to US to stand trial on charges of espionage or criminal conspiracy. The US government supposedly has a secret grand jury at the ready in Virginia. On Friday, Britain’s recently created Supreme Court agreed to hear Assange’s extradition appeal in February on the grounds of “public interest.” Seven lords will hear the case which challenges the right of the Swedish prosecutor to serve a European arrest warrant. Assange is reportedly worried that Manning could cop a plea and testify against him.

Saudi Prince Puts $300 Million in Twitter

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 10:00:00 EST

Expecting high growth, Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal and Kingdom Holding Company (KHC), the investment fund he largely owns, have put $300 million in Twitter. A canny investor, the insanely rich prince, a nephew of Saudi King Abdullah, bought into Apple when it was down on its luck and the newly returned Steve Jobs was borrowing money from Microsoft to keep the lights on. He also bought into Citigroup, when the bank needed it, on a cold call from the Carlyle Group and owns a piece of General Motors. The announcement Monday said the investment in Twitter was the “result of several months of negotiations and comprehensive due diligence.” Described as a “strategic stake,” it is thought to amount to 3.6% of the company based on an assumed valuation of $8.4 billion.

Amazon to Fix Some Kindle Fire Problems

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 06:45:00 EST

In the next two weeks Amazon said Monday that it’s going to update the software in its $199 Kindle Fire over-the-air to address buyer complaints about the performance of the vaunted seven-inch Android tablet. It’s supposed to make the balky touchscreen easier to navigate and let users erase recent activity as well as choose what items are displayed. If that’s all, it won’t address all the gripes including scrolling, Wi-Fi and Internet access and stodgy apps. Some of the widgets have reportedly been returned. TechCrunch says the Fire is just fine inside Amazon’s “walled garden.”

Treehouse Interactive and Ventana New Media Partner

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 01:37:00 EST

TreeHouse Interactive, a provider of on-demand marketing automation and partner relationship management (PRM) solutions, on Thursday announced its partnership with integrated content marketing firm Ventana New Media. The partnership combines content marketing syndication capabilities of the Ventana New Media Engine while tapping into TreeHouse’s Marketing View marketing automation system features that include lead nurturing, content marketing library, Conversion Intelligence and Reveal Web Analytics functionality. The combination gives marketers the ability to drive explosive demand generation through content they produce and more effectively target and nurture leads as they move through the buying cycle. Ventana’s New Media Engine greatly expands the amount of outlets for company content while reducing the time and effort necessary to reach those outlets. New media syndication channels.

WikiLeaks Founder Gets Last Chance to Defeat Swedish Arrest Warrant

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 06:45:00 EST

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is going to get his crack at Britain’s very highest court in an attempt to prevent being extradited to Sweden for questioning related to charges of alleged rape made by two female WikiLeaks volunteers last year. Whether the UK’s Supreme Court will hear his case remains to be seen. The High Court that gave him the green light to continue his appeal Monday also warned that it’s dubious he will succeed. Assange’s lawyers have adopted the position that the extradition process was flawed. They have two weeks to petition for a hearing. Assange, who claims the encounters were consensual, has been under house arrest at an estate outside London for most of the year. The High Court Monday rejected Assange’s claim that the behavior he is charged with would have been legal under UK law.

Massive Facebook IPO Apparently on the Runway

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 08:30:00 EST

Facebook is thinking of going public in the spring and raising $10 billion – a record amount for a high-tech or Internet IPO or pretty much any other IPO – on an estimated valuation of more than $100 billion, according to both Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal’s anonymous sources. Apple, now the most valuable high-tech company, currently has a market cap of around $349.57 billion. Facebook could put in its papers to IPO before of the end of the year. The Journal says it is talking to the SEC about the timing of the filing and suggests the IPO could come off sometime between April and July. Facebook was only supposedly worth $50 billion in January when it took in a $1.5 billion investment from Goldman Sachs and friends.

SmartBear Delivers Firefox 8 and Internet Explorer 8 Browser Support

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 09:09:00 EST

SmartBear Software has announced that AlertSite, the company’s Web and mobile performance monitoring solution, will support testing on both Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox browsers. Organizations can now test, monitor and improve how their website is performing across both browsers to ensure customers are getting an optimal user experience, no matter their browser preference. The AlertSite built-into-the-browser transaction recorder captures and plays back user events to measure the end-user experience exactly as it unfolds in the browser. Now users can record any multi-step transaction or click stream and play it back on multiple browsers to simulate user experience. Unlike other Web monitoring tools that require separate recording processes for each browser, AlertSite users can simply record once and monitor from both Firefox and Internet Explorer across multiple locations. Bojan Simic, President and Principal Analyst at TRAC Research, said, “TRAC's research shows that the Web browser is the number one "blind spot" in the application delivery chain. As the amount of application component processing in the browser is increasing, organizations are realizing that they need to gain more visibility into how the performance of the Web browser impacts the quality of user experience. AlertSite's announcement allows organizations to address one of the key challenges for application performance monitoring and enables them to have more control over the quality of Web experience."

Adobe to Restructure, Let 750 Go - UPDATE

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:00:00 EST

Adobe said Tuesday that it’s going to restructure and let 750 people in North America and Europe go, 7% of its workforce, to focus on products that create digital content on multiple devices and platforms and digital marketing. In other words, its newfangled Creative Cloud, due out next year, and the Omniture-Demdex-Auditude side of the business. “Our mission is to produce the world’s content and maximize the impact of that content,” Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said in a statement. Adobe will cut its investment in enterprise software. It’s reportedly shutting down remote US development locations and getting ready to move more of the next release of Creative Suite (CS) development to India and China, suggesting that the sunset of Flash as we know it is commencing. Flash will be replaced by HTML 5 helped along by Adobe’s recent acquisition of HTML 5 house Nitobi Software. ZDNet says Adobe has quietly told developers that that development of its mobile Flash browser plug-in will stop. Current Android and RIM’s Playbook configurations will get critical bug fixes and security updates. Otherwise, Adobe “will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations.” The company will focus instead on tools for creating mobile apps by packaging the code to run on Adobe AIR. Sounds like a win for the late lamented Steve Jobs. By Wednesday Adobe had blogged about its decision at http://blogs.adobe.com/conversations/2011/11/flash-focus.html. It sayd Flash development for PC will continue. The move will reportedly take six months to play out. People are supposedly being told to finish and ship CS6, find another job in the company if they can, or get lost. Sounds like after CS6 ships, especially if the next two quarters aren’t exactly swell, Adobe might can more people. At the moment Adobe expects to take a restructuring charge of $87 million-$94 million, primarily for severance. And because of the charge it cut Q4 guidance from 41 cents-50 cents a share down to 30 cents-38 cents a share. As a result, its stock capitalized after-hours dropping 9% to $27.69. Immediate revenue guidance was unchanged at $1.07 billion-$1.12 billion but next year revenue could be 4%-5% lower. Wall Street expected 2012 revenues to be up 9%. With the changes, Adobe expects to drive “faster and more predicable growth in FY2013 and beyond.”

If Nothing Else, Yahoo Is Sticky

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 06:45:00 EST

Yahoo is reportedly proving itself the stickiest of creatures. After putting itself on the block, it now supposedly doesn’t want to get bought – again – like some nasty reprise of the Microsoft fiasco. Instead it maybe wants to sell its Asian assets – its positions in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan – and pay off its stockholders with a tax-avoiding special dividend – it could do that if Yahoo didn’t change hands – and/or buy back shares. All Things Digital thinks the Yahoo Japan deal is the closest to getting done and could bring Yahoo maybe $6 billion. Of course the sale of its Asian assets wouldn’t necessarily stop Yahoo from getting sold afterwards and the price would then represent its core assets – or what’s left of them – and the negotiations might be simpler and more profitable provided anybody is still talking to Yahoo.

F5 International Technology Center Video Tour

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 14:52:00 EDT

I visited F5′s International Technology Center in the heart of London and want to share an amazing tour with Shareef Qureshi, F5 Product Management Engineer. The facility includes a state of the art lab facility, executive briefing center, workroom facilities and an immersive TelePresence room. See the equipment, how it’s managed and cooled, the meeting [...]

OCP Formalized with a Foundation

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 08:00:00 EDT

Facebook Thursday set up a non-profit foundation to run its six-month-old Open Compute Project (OCP) aimed at defining the cheapest and most efficient massively web-scale infrastructure possible using the open source model. Its first OCP data center in Prineville, Oregon, managed a 38% increase in energy efficiency for 24% less than other Facebook facilities cost. The idea is to push the envelope. The Open Compute Foundation (OCF) is reportedly well enough funded to start. There is a board of directors. Hardware designs and source files will be published, IP contributed and many eyes will look for ways to improve the standard à la Linux. The idea is to speed innovation by commoditizing the baser elements.

Facebook to Build Date Center Near Arctic Circle

Fri, 28 Oct 2011 08:00:00 EDT

Facebook is going to build its first data center outside the United States on the edge of the Arctic Circle in the Swedish town of Lulea, a thousand miles north of Stockholm. The site, where the temperatures are among the coldest in Europe, will let Facebook harness the elements to air-cool its tens of thousands of homemade servers and tap renewable energy from nearby hydroelectrical plants that already supply 9% of Sweden’s electricity. It’s estimated Facebook’s annual electrical bill for 120 MW of power will be $72 million. The data center, housed in three buildings each 300,000 square feet with backup diesel generators just in case, is supposed to be the largest in Europe when it’s finished. Facebook’s European users should then get better performance than they’re getting now from the states.

WikiLeaks Stops Leaking to Raise Money

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 07:45:00 EDT

WikiLeaks may go out of business by the end of the year. It needs $3.5 million over the next 12 months to keep the lights on and says it can’t get it from its supporters because of the “financial blockade” mounted by Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Bank of America and Western Union, which have refused to process donations to the cause since the end of last year. That was right after WikiLeaks started releasing purloined American diplomatic cables in violation of American security interests. Since then donations are down a reported 95% to less than $100,000. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Monday that WikiLeaks is temporarily going to stop publishing the sensitive documents it’s been leaked and devote itself to fund raising. But “If the blockade is not torn down by the end of the year, the organization cannot continue its work.”

Google Eyes Yahoo Again

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 01:32:00 EDT

Google may try to bankroll a takeover of Yahoo same as Microsoft, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal this weekend. The deal would take upwards of $20 billion. The Justice Department stopped Google from doing an ad deal with Yahoo in 2008 by threatening to sue for antitrust because of Google’s search monopoly. Its action pushed Yahoo to do a deal with Microsoft, a deal Microsoft may now have to protect. Scrutiny of any Google-Yahoo deal is likely to intensify. Google may be trying to make any Microsoft buy-in more expensive. Google has reportedly talked to at least two unidentified private equity firms about financing a deal to buy Yahoo’s core business according to unidentified Journal sources. Negotiations are reportedly still young and may not come to anything. Alibaba, Yahoo’s Chinese partner, is also interested.

Samsung Galaxy Tablet Banned in Australia

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 07:00:00 EDT

Apple has gotten the temporary injunction it was seeking to block Samsung from selling its Android-based Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia, according to reports out of the Sydney courtroom where its infringement motion was heard. Samsung’s lawyers previously complained that the thing would be a dead letter if it didn’t hit the market this month in time to capture the holiday rush. Samsung agreed a couple of months ago not to market the device ahead of a court ruling. A German court has also forbidden the tablet to be sold in Germany, the main European market. Both actions are supposed to proceed to full-blown trials probably next year although the Australian court is offering an early hearing. Samsung has resisted the idea of a quick trial. Defending its dominance Apple has accused Samsung of “slavishly” copying its technology in multiple jurisdictions. A hearing in the US is imminent. The Australian federal court upheld Apple’s objections to Samsung’s touchscreen and the gestures that control it that Apple claims are covered by two of its patents.

Alibaba Wants Yahoo

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 19:02:00 EDT

Alibaba is interested in buying Yahoo, which owns 43% of the big closely held Chinese Internet house. Alibaba chairman Jack Ma, who plans to spend the next year in the states, was refreshingly blunt about his interest last Friday at a China 2.0 event at Stanford University where he said, “We are very interested in Yahoo because our Alibaba Group is so important to Yahoo, and Yahoo is also very important to us.” He made it clear he was interested in all of Yahoo. Apparently, however, there are unidentified “political issues.” Presumably that means the US government, and perhaps the Committee on Foreign Investment in United States (CIFUS), is worried about Beijing, its treatment of personal data, its censorship and its hacking. Then there’s the little matter of Alibaba transferring Alipay, China’s popular online-payment service, to a Chinese company controlled by Ma without asking Yahoo. Under a recent deal with Yahoo, Alibaba will get at least $2 billion if Alipay IPOs. Yahoo, meanwhile, is sorta kinda looking for a replacement for ousted CEO Carol Bartz while reviewing its strategic options, a process that could take months, Yahoo said. One of those options is – or was – to sell out to private-equity house Silver Lake, which would sell off Yahoo’s Asian assets (Alibaba has dibs on Yahoo’s position in Alibaba) and then either fix or sell the main operation. Silver Lake also owns a piece of Alibaba and may be one of the private-equity firms that reportedly approached Alibaba about a Yahoo acquisition. Yahoo currently has a market value of around $17 billion. It’s unclear what Alibaba’s financial resources are. It was valued at about $32 billion by its latest investors. Stifel Nicolaus thinks Microsoft, Softbank and Silver Lake could put money in Alibaba to push a deal through. Yahoo founder Jerry Yang and chairman Roy Bostock foolishly turned down a $47.5 billion acquisition offer from Microsoft a few years ago.

Yahoo Ousts CEO Carol Bartz

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 10:00:00 EDT

Yahoo president and CEO Carol Bartz was fired Tuesday – over the phone by chairman Roy Bostock by her own brief e-mail account– after 32 months on the job. She has been replaced for the moment by CFO Tim Morse. Tech blogger Kara Swisher of AllThingsD, who has followed Yahoo like a shadow, broke the story, which was subsequently confirmed by the company. Morse, who will keep his day job, has been there all of three months after leaving Altera. The company said it will hire “a nationally recognized executive search firm” to look for another miracle worker who probably doesn’t exist. Swisher remarked that “Why Yahoo’s board did not name a new leader immediately is curious and might indicate a larger deal around Yahoo is in the offing….The players who have sniffed around of late are powerful, sources said, including Silver Lake Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, former News Corp. exec Peter Chernin and Providence Equity Partners, among others. Also in the Wall Street rumor mill recently are large companies: AT&T, News Corp. and Verizon. All the schemes are different – ranging from taking it private to making a large investment to splitting it into parts – although they all seem to require cooperation with Yahoo to get done. And while there is no serious effort afoot as yet, there have been increasing signs of late that Yahoo’s board is ready to listen to any serious offers, said multiple sources, especially as the company has continued to drift under the leadership of Bartz.” To support Morse the company means to create an “Executive Leadership Council” consisting of general counsel Michael Callahan, chief product officer Blake Irving, executive VP, Americas Ross Levinsohn, EMEA chief Rich Riley, and APAC chief Rose Tsou. They are also supposed to do a “comprehensive strategic review.” Yahoo co-founders David Filo and Jerry Yang, who blew an acquisition by Microsoft for an ungodly amount of money, will also bend Morse’s ear. Yang has reportedly been on the outs with Bartz lately and apparently had a hand in her ouster. According to a statement issued in Bostock’s name, “The Board sees enormous growth opportunities on which Yahoo! can capitalize, and our primary objective is to leverage the Company’s leadership and current business assets and platforms to execute against these opportunities.” TechCrunch says the tough-talking profanity-inclined Bartz never held more than a 77% approval rating among Yahoo staff between March 2009 and March 2010 and that the number dropped to 50% this past March. Swisher described Bartz’s performance as “decidedly bumpy and mostly downhill…Yahoo’s recent financial results have been weak, its key advertising business is struggling, its attrition rate among engineers and others is startlingly high and its product innovation cycle seems stopped up.” Former SVP of communications Brad Garlinghouse tweeted, “Ding dong the witch is dead.” What may have broken the camel’s back for the board after continuing losses to Google and Facebook was the recent impasse with Alibaba over the co-owned Alipay subsidiary, which Alibaba up and spun out to a business controlled by Alibaba CEO Jack Ma. Yahoo is Alibaba’s largest investor.

The 1st Commandment of Software: Know Thy Customer

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 14:47:00 EDT

Far too many key people at software companies don’t have a clue about their customers. It’s a Software Worst Practice. It's closely related to another serious Software Sin: no clue of who the "target customer" is. In my conversations with software companies over the last six months, I've heard some of the most pathetic excuses lately, from all functional areas of software companies: “I’m in PR, someone else comes up with the content”. “I’m a developer, I write code”. “I’m a performance architect, my job is to remove bottlenecks and make things go fast”. “I sell, Sales is based on relationships and closing skills”. “I’m the CFO, other people do that”.

Product Positioning – Do You Have it Backwards?

Sat, 20 Aug 2011 18:00:00 EDT

First of all, let me explode one common misconception. Product positioning is not something you do once the product is built. Product positioning isn’t meant to be kept a secret, nicely isolated from product development, sales and the rest of the company. It’s not static either. That’s the secret that Apple understands so well, and one of the reason’s why they were (albeit briefly) the world’s most valuable company. Marketing does not begin once the product is finished and released. Marketing is not just telling the world about your product – i.e. some product that already exists. Marketing is an integral part of the development cycle. It begins at product conception. And it ends at product retirement.

Raj Rajaratnam's Goose Is Apparently Cooked

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 23:02:00 EDT

Billionaire hedge fund trader Raj Rajaratnam, 54, convicted of making millions on insider trades, lost a bid Tuesday to have his 14-count conviction for securities fraud and conspiracy overturned. His lawyers claimed the evidence presented at trial was insufficient for a conviction although Raj was caught in flagrante delicto trading on insider tips by government wiretaps. The judge in a 49-page opinion disagreed, finding that any “reasonable jury” would have found him guilty. Rajaratnam is supposed to be sentenced September 27. The prosecution is asking for a stiff 19-and-a-half to 24-and-a-half years sentence. Whatever he draws he’s expected to appeal. His lawyers claim he is sick and will die in prison if he pulls a long stretch. Rajaratnam and his circle trafficked mostly in brand name high-tech stocks and the corruption ran up to the top of IBM. Raj’s confederate Danielle Chiesi recently drew two-and-a-half years. He is supposed to have made almost $64 million over seven years.

Do You Infect Customers with Sick Software?

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 13:34:00 EDT

Sick software is easy to identify if you're objective. Sick software damages the companies that produce it as well as those who purchase the software. Typically in such chaotic product management methodologies, proper design, architecture, usability, testing and quality assurance end up being tossed out the window. Developer testing and QA particularly suffer as they are (stupidly) viewed as not being terribly critical and simply “slow down the development process” and will “result in missing our latest release date”.

Worst Product Management Practices: Part 1

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 15:50:00 EDT

Every marketer strives to be sales-driven. However, that doesn’t mean that you should embrace a product management discipline that includes changing the product every time a new sales opportunity surfaces. I’ve kept this tattered Dilbert cartoon strip on my office wall since 1996. It’d be a lot funnier if it weren’t so true. Every marketer strives to be sales-driven. However, that doesn’t mean that you should embrace a product management discipline that includes changing the product every time a new sales opportunity surfaces

Why Product Positioning Is Useless

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 15:28:00 EDT

Product Positioning is mostly useless. A waste of time. Simply because it’s so very rarely done well.

Online Project Management Software Helps Teams Balance Resources

Thu, 11 Aug 2011 11:15:00 EDT

Project Insight, online project management software, is assisting teams with keeping their projects on track during vacation season. With schools out for summer, many resources decide to take some time away from work. Project Insight's powerful resource management capabilities are helping organizations balance their resources' workloads while others are away on holiday. The graphical displays within the project management software make it easy for to effectively monitor the available resources' workloads and balance them accordingly. Many project teams have resources that span across more than just one department and project. Project Insight's resource allocation report can drill down to each project and task from a single view.

RIM Playbook Arrives with the Stars in the Philippines

Wed, 10 Aug 2011 05:49:00 EDT

The RIM BlackBerry Playbook made a star-studded debut in the Philippines, with local telco Globe Telecom sticking it into the hands of numerous celebrities during a launch event at an upscale hotel in Makati City, Metro Manila. The launch party carried a "Happy Hour" theme and more than a dozen entertainment stars in a nation that leads the world in per-person use of social networking sites, leads Southeast Asia in its use of mobile devices, and carries no country's water when it comes to worshipping its star performers. Globe is primarily owned by a Singaporean telco and the Ayala family, one of the leading oligarchical families in the Philippines. It has annual revenues in excess of $1 billion (US) and competes like hell with a government-driven telco (which is five times larger) and a third major telco. Globe is known for its savvy, aggressive marketing campaigns and a wide variety of plans and mobile devices. In a country with an average income of $1,745 (compared to $46,000 in the US), more than 80% of households have a mobile phone, and about 40% are expected to have a smart mobile device within three years.

Facebook Rates Tilera ‘Swell’

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 08:45:00 EDT

Guess Tilera can stop all the double-talk about whether or not Facebook – and the other major-league cloud companies – except the not-invented-here-enamored Google – are interested its newfangled proprietary many-core x86-compatible servers. Facebook has just publicly admitted it’s been testing Tilera’s last-generation widgetry and rated it the industry’s best performance per watt – better than Intel at common data center apps and at running the fabled Memcached so important to Facebook et al. The social networking giant said Monday that Tilera servers are 4x better at performance per watt than classic four-core x86 Nehalem servers, leading to the logical conclusion that Facebook will start deploying Tilera servers in production once Tilera’s 64-bit next-generation machines are available.

An Executive’s Guide to Cutting HR Costs

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 08:15:00 EDT

Entrepreneurial execs know that they need to follow the rules, but they may not realize what decisions may lead to the two vital components that keep HR costs lower: 1. Increasing productivity 2. Minimizing human capital expenses The following white paper will focus on minimizing human capital expenses in four areas: 1. Hiring the right person for the right seat on the right bus 2. Improving performance with motivational yet balanced total compensation 3. Complying with the law 4. Offering competitive benefits, communicated effectively

Acquia Gets $15 Million D Round

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 19:36:00 EDT

Acquia, the popularizer of Drupal, the open source content management system, has gotten a $15 million D round, its largest yet, bringing total outside investment to $38.5 million. It’s supposed to use the money to expand internationally, particularly in Europe. It claims it’s seeing rapid growth with revenues up 225% year-over-year and its customer base tripling to more than 1,500 in eight months. Tenaya Capital is a new investor, which joined existing backers Northbridge and Sigma Partners in the infusion. Tenaya gets a board seat. Acquia was started by Drupal’s creator in 2008 and currently provides a managed Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud and a developer cloud as well as customer configurations, tools, consulting and subscription-based support and given that Drupal can be cranky, users can probably use it. Its client roster includes Twitter, Al Jazeera, Mercedes-Benz, Stanford University, Intuit and the Defense Department. It reckons that more than 2% of all web sites in the world are built on Drupal.

Asia Pacific Web Application Firewall Market CY2010

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 02:00:00 EDT

Research and Markets has announced the addition of Frost & Sullivan's new report "Asia Pacific (including Japan) Web Application Firewall Market CY2010" to their offering. This research service analyzes the Web application firewall (WAF) as a security technology, either hardware or software that sits before the Web server and analyzes layer 7 traffic (a whole session, not packets) to protect applications from attacks aimed at exploiting vulnerabilities found in the applications. The Web Application Firewall (WAF) market registered a robust growth of 28.4 percent growth on a year on year basis in 2010, reaching a total market size of $60.2 million in Asia Pacific.