September 2007 Archives

Ok, this is just a funny story in case you were following when Amazon patented they "one-click" check out, and later on when it was rejected.  Now the rejection is rejected!

Amazon filed an appeal when USPTO decided to reject the patent application because the method was deemed "obvious".  The case has been reviewed by three new USPTO examiners, and the result is that the new guys have "rejected the rejection".  What they are saying is that they have not found the obviousness, and are asking the original examiner to explain, in a more obvious way, what he found so obvious in the application!

Ok, enough jokes, back to work...

Never heard of Zingku?  Well, don't worry.  From the news I'm seeing it looks like it was not on anybody's radar.  But nevertheless, Google just bought Zingku for an undisclosed amount.  The service is interesting, but nothing that I would call unique.  There are all kinds of speculations about why Google did so, and GigaOm thinks it's going to be an addition to Orkut, but if you ask me, it's about who knows who and having good VC/investment banker connections...

On a separate note (I do not have much interest in telecom anymore), in case you have not heard 3Com was sold for $2.2B to Bain Capital and Huawei Technologies, a Chinese telco.  Not bad.

Not much of a "technology" news, but a good thing to know and a good thing to use:  Amazon launched its online MP3 store at www.amazonmp3.com.  There are two good things about it:  Everything is DRM free, so you're not locked in, and everything is MP3 at 256KHz.  Since I have been ripping my CDs at 192KHz after experimenting with quality I can tell for sure that 256KHz is more than satisfactory.

For various reasons I have been looking at this part of the industry for a while now, and this one got me by surprise.  Per TechCrunch (no official statements yet) Mozy - the online backup service - is snatched by EMC for $76M.  Now to have the perspective, you need to know that: 1) Mozy had raised less than $2M in VC money (sweet deal, huh?), and 2) As a user of their service (this is just one opinion but you can say that it's an "informed" opinion) their service was far from reliable.  So EMC has not bought a good "product", it has bought a good "concept" and arguably a good team.

Well, nevertheless, congratulations to whoever that made this happen, probably their CEO.  The product might have not performed, but the company certainly did :-)

Mashable has compiled an extensive list of various open source and free applications in various categories.  Definitely worth having around as a reference.  At this point it is beyond denial that open source startups have a good chance of success:

http://mashable.com/2007/09/23/open-source/

TechCrunch reports of Google's plans for making an "even more open" API for social applications on top of their social graph.  I had posted Brad Fitzpatrick's long article here on this blog, which was the herald of a very open architecture for inter-social networking.  With him leading LiveJournal, SixApart, and now the social platform I have to say I'm not surprised at the news (although I have to say I'm impressed at How Michael Arrington puts his hands on this kind of information, but well, this is not the first time!)

I ran across two interesting articles today.  These are not industry news but reflections and reviews, so depending on your level of interest you may or may not find them relevant to what you usually see here.

Welcome to Naked Generation is an interesting article looking at the implications of being too much in the open in the online world, and a very valid question of "guys, were are we heading?"  There is a very wide spectrum of people with online lives, and social networks in general are creating more and more of a "it's ok to be in the open" attitude.  Personally I don't like it - just an opinion - and I relate very much to what Caroline McCarthy says in the article.

The other article is Elinor Mills' experiment with Amazon Mechanical Turk.  The concept of AMT intrigued me from the early days Amazon announced it, and I still think it's a noble idea.  But aside from volunteer collaboration, I have never been able to find justification in people contributing to it (read financial benefits).  So it was interesting to see somebody actually spending some time to see if it makes sense or not.  I guess I still think the same - it does not.

From Forbes - and yes Bill Gates is still number one.  This is a nice slide show with pictures and all:

http://www.forbes.com/2007/09/18/richlist07_The-Richest-Americans_slide_2.html?thisSpeed=15000

And Google co-founders have made their way to the top ten!

This is funny because I have been looking at this issue for some time now, and I was feeling the need for it, and I even had a prototype of something like this in the making.  Another one of those ideas that feels like a good service and a few months down the road is launched by one of the big gus...  Oh well.

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9782108-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

TechCrunch reports of a Game Company founded by a 12 years old, receiving $6.5M in VC funding.  I remember a while ago we saw 17-year CEOs and company founders.  Seriously, how young is too young for having a business?!

Here's the competition for Powerpoint:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/our-feature-presentation.html

Interesting numbers about the company revenue and the valuation.  Also covers Citrix/XenSource acquisition:

http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9780434-7.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5

Been an eventful today... Aside from the Facebook news, a number of other things were announced:

Google AdSense for Mobile

$3M in seed funding for Penelope - open source Thunderbird related company

And finally...

Yahoo! buys Zimbra for $350M.

Oh, and did I mention - this is a few days old though - that Yahoo! launched its own social networking site?

Ok, I had mentioned Amazon's prize, I did not in fact mention Google's - that's on green cars which does not fall in my domain, and now Facebook:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=6286

From the CEO of Ning, Gina Bianchini:

Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned by Starting a Web Company

http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=377634011

We just released this feature in Frucall - albeit our product collections or "Lists" are more general and cover everything including books:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/collect-share-and-discover-books.html

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