2008 just started strong with probably one of the most important acquisitions of the year, taking us all by surprise. According to Swedish media, the acquisition fee was $800 million in cash and $200 million in options.
Considering that MySQL powers some of the largest sites, this might be a nice strategic move to get a foot into the RDBMS game and wag it back to the likes of Oracle and M$. However, I hope they keep it alive and healthy for the open source community. For I cannot imagine LAMP without the strong “M” in it.
Who is Sun Microsystems?
Founded 1982 by Andreas von Bechtolsheim, Vinod Khosla, Bill Joy and Scott McNealy
34.200 employees worldwide, 13.9 billion dollars (9.4 billion euros) in revenues FY 2007, market cap (total value of all Sun shares) about the same as yearly revenues
Grew astronomically with the Web, suffered from the Web bubble, now profitable over the last four quarters
Lead by Scott McNealy until 2006, now by Jonathan Schwartz (a prolific blogger)
The world’s biggest contributor to Open Source: Open Office, Java (now under GPL), GlassFish, NetBeans — and soon MySQL
Environmentally friendly; large numbers of distributed employees working at least partially from home
Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, just south of Cupertino (MySQL’s North American headquarters)
Counts some of the worlds most brilliant innovators amongst its current and past employees
Wordpress is one of the top free blogging platforms out there. And as of recent the guys at WP decided to surprise their users even more and throw in a surprising 3GB of storage. Compared to the former 50MB this is lavish in deed. Not only that, but compared with other free online blogging platforms, Wordpress does pretty good. For example Google only gives you 1GB of storage space.
And if you need more than 3GB you can also upgrade to 5GB ($20), 15GB ($50), or 25GB ($90) per year. This is pretty good compared to the $300/year TypePad users have to pay to get 3GB of extra space.
In the end Wordpress is one of the best free blogging platforms out there, and it seems they try hard to keep it that way.
If you’re one of the few humans on the planet lucky enough not to have a copy of Microsoft Word on their PC, you can occasionally find yourself in a bit of a bind when someone sends you a document which was created with Microsoft Word.
Luckily, this is one of the rare times when Microsoft comes to your rescue — without asking for your credit card details.
Microsoft distributes a free Microsoft Word viewer, along with viewers for many of their other popular applications.
After experimenting for a few months with various ways to introduce ads in their videos, YouTube is finally launching a video ad platform. The current format is represented by a strip which occupies 20% of the video. The ad appears only after 15 seconds of the movie have passed and if the user clicks the ad, the video is paused and a new window opens for the ad. If the user does not click the ad, it’s displayed for 10 seconds and then it disappears.
As for the pricing, Google choose to apply a 20$ fee for 1000 impressions. Although it’s a little weird they use this instead of the Google classic Pey Per Click system, but Google officials think that safer CPM model will be better for their customers.
So having YouTube as a constant user-generated content pool, Google can provide extensive coverage for publishers and interesting ways to financially attract advertisers. But for now the platform has to be tested to eliminate eventual bugs and to attract publishers.
When Google launched their new Google Gears service a couple of months ago, I was sure online-based applications will make full use of it. And that’s just the case with Zoho, one of the most popular online office suite and a direct contestant of Google Docs.
The fact that they used Google Gears to provide offline availability for Zoho Writer before Google did is funny in a way. But for now only Zoho Writer will be accessible offline, the rest of the Zoho suite is going to be made available in weeks to come, and besides that the documents will be read-only when offline.
After the install of the Google Gears plugin a “Go Offline” button will be enabled, not that this only works with Internet Explorer 6 or higher or Mozilla 1.5 or higher. Zoho lovers should be pleased, as this is only the beginning and other features will become available in the following 4 or 5 weeks.
The weird thing is that the code renders correctly in Firefox, Opera, Safari and even IE7, but when accessed with IE6, it pops in a fatal error mshtml.dll. Special thanks to Hamachiya2 (a Japanese blogger) who actually discovered this.
Nintendo Wii’s Shopping Channel was unavailable for three hours or so earlier. It was a sign. It seems that Nintendo updated the Wii firmware in order to include a few small but very nice features. Some sources report that an increase of the User Interface’s speed is in place.
See this report on the full features implemented with this Firmware upgrade, and you can see some interesting screenshots from the referred source.
I myself own a Nintendo Wii and I will update it to the new features as soon as I have some free time
Just a few days ago, KDE 4.0 Beta was released, a release that marks the beginning of the integration process for KDE. This release is bound to bring new technologies with its libraries straight to the applications.
This comes about two months after the first Alpha was made public. Now KDE enters a stage of a full freeze regarding the library interface. From now on, the applications will focus on integrating the new technology refined during the last months, and the library developers will try to fix all bugs found during this process.
There will be no new applications for the official KDE modules. In the following weeks, KDE developers will be able to add features to their applications until the next beta is released and the application features will be frozen as well.
Where are they standing at this very point? Have a look here and find out.
The Google Mashup Editor is a new project launched by Google, intended for creating quick mashups and simple applications. Unfortunately, it’s currently in the beta stage of development and the access seems limited to a small number of developers during this test period. If you want, you may get notified when further registrations will be allowed. All you have to do is register here.
Here are the main features, for those interested:
Google services mashed up
Take some AJAX UI components, data from your users and Google services like Google Base and Google Maps or external feeds and mash them all together using our simple framework.
Common web technologies doing uncommon things
The Google Mashup Editor allows you to use HTML, Javascript, CSS and XML to create an infinite variety of applications with technology you are familiar with.
Simple tools for sophisticated apps
Using the Google Mashup Editor you can create, debug and deploy your application in one interface.
As Google is releasing more and more mobile-oriented services one can only wonder where would this lead in the end. Well some say Google is preparing to launch its very own mobile handset to promote its proprietary mobile ads system. And although now it seems to be somewhat unrealistic, if anyone can launch a free, ads supported mobile telephony service, Google is the one to do it.
Also referred to as the Google Phone, what people call the GPhone, is going to use the new mobile phone browser Google is working on, that will be optimized for browsing and using services la Gmail, and of course for displaying Google ads. Also rumor has it that Google will operate independent of any mobile phone carrier, so it would create a serious threat for other companies offering mobile services.
If this proves to be a success in the end, Google could make its way on a new market to place its ads and a new market to generate revenue.
