Google last week lost its shot at getting the Android trial delayed while the Patent and Trademark Office re-examines Oracle’s Java patents. Presiding judge William Alsup said the trial is still on for Halloween. Google did get its Daubert hearing. The judge told Oracle to find a new theory and bring its claims of $2.6 billion or $6 billion or whatever it is within the realm of reality. The judge outlined a possible alternative approach that starts at $100 million, chump change by Oracle standards even with trebling, leaving Florian Mueller – who’s been following the case wall-to-wall and making some pretty mind reading-style guesses about what comes next – to conclude that Oracle’s best big money bet lies in getting Android enjoined so it can negotiate a big fat per-unit royalty from Google.
Oracle is going to get the face time with Google CEO Larry Page that it wanted. Page has been ordered to sit still and answer Oracle’s questions about those Java licensing talks Google had with Sun during a two-hour deposition. Oracle is supposed to limit its questions to “topics relevant to the willfulness of defendant’s alleged patent infringement, and the value of Android” to Google. Google said last week that it rejected Sun’s proposal that Google pay $100 million in royalties to use Java in Android. A Google lawyer described the offer as a co-development deal, rather than a patent license despite an internal e-mail written by Android founder Andy Rubin saying Google needed a Java license.
CloudBees, the Java PaaS start-up founded by former JBoss CTO Sacha Labourey, has gotten a $10.5 million B round eight months after its $4 million A round that had JBoss founder Marc Fleury take a piece of the action. The new round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with the participation of existing backer Matrix Partners. CloudBees only launched in November with a platform for developing, running and managing enterprise Java apps in the cloud. The widgetry currently includes DEV@cloud, a service that lets developers take their build and test environments to the cloud, and RUN@cloud, which lets them deploy those apps to production on the cloud.
Apple is having Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) produce next-generation chips for its mobile devices under a trial manufacturing run, according to a source Reuters says has knowledge of the matter. It appears then that Apple means to wrench at least part of its business away from Samsung with which it’s embroiled in a huge patent infringement battle. Samsung is also competing against Apple with a range of Android-based smartphones and tablets. Reuters suggests that orders could depend on yield rates but still look likely to start next year.
On January 25, 2011 the overthrow of the Egyptian government began – quietly at first, with non-violent demonstrations of long-held grievances. But, by February 11 Mubarak had resigned, the government of a long-stable country had been overturned and the future of the entire region was altered forever. With the overwhelming amount of web content and social media we are compelled to ask: “could we have seen this coming?” Yes, is the answer – provided we’re willing to look at information in a new way. To a person analyzing “big data,” this means that we must include the broadest range of data available. Increasingly, social media and other web-based content represent a rich source of timely information and would be very useful to a broader understanding of people, events, organizations, etc. However, these new data sources come with complications like volume, validity, and understanding in context. We decided to explore this issue in more detail. We wanted to find out what connections could be uncovered when the data came from social media and web content.
Apparently tablets and smartphones haven’t driven a stake though the PC’s heart quite yet. Although Q2 is seasonally its nadir, Intel came in with another one of those record-breaking quarters Wednesday. Its revenues were up 21% to $13 billion, net income up 2% to $3 billion, EPS up 6% to 54 cents, and its gross margin was 61%, down 6.6% from last year when it was uncharacteristically high. Wall Street figured it would do 51 cents on $12.83 billion. Since Intel’s EPS was 59 cents before items it really crushed that expectation. It said it saw double-digit revenue growth across all business segments – even PCs.
Google told the court considering whether the Oracle-Google Android suit should be stayed that it’s willing to settle. That’s like the next best thing to admitting that it’s guilty of infringing the Java patents that now belong to Oracle and could lose the case, something the judge has already sussed out. Google made the suggestion in a joint filing despite the Patent and Trademark Office’s preliminary finding against a couple of the Oracle patents. Google’s trying to get the trial stayed pending a re-examination of all the patents, but is arguing for at least a narrowing of the case “for the sake of efficiency,” it said: “Such a narrowed case will also eliminate the need for those efforts specifically directed at the claims rejected through re-examination, including motion practice, expert reports, and other trial preparation, as well as make it more likely that the parties could reach an informal resolution of the matter.” (Emphasis added.)
I’ve been recently involved helping a new European start-up just launched a new Platform-as-a-Service capable of running and automatically scaling any Java application. Here’s a quick write-up on why I think Jelastic is really onto something, a service to try and a company to watch. Say, you’ve got a great Java application which you want to put on the internet and make it available to the world. Believe it or not, up until today, what sounds like a trivial task simply could not be done. You effectively had to choose between lack of scalability, necessity to manually set up and maintain the whole software stack, requirement to re-write your code to conform to a particular framework (and get locked into it thereafter), or a combination of the above.
Developing your Software as a Service (SaaS) takes you away from the dark ages of programming and into the new age in which copyright protection, DMA, and pirating don’t exist. In the current age of computing, people don’t expect to pay for software but instead prefer to pay for the support and other services that come with it. When was the last time anyone paid for a web browser? With the advent of Open Source applications, the majority of paid software is moving to hosted systems which rely less on the users’ physical machines. This means you don’t need to support more hardware and other software that may conflict with your software, for example, permissions, firewalls, and antivirus software. Instead of developing a simple desktop application that you need to defend and protect against pirating and cloning, you can develop your software as a service; releasing updates and new content seamlessly while charging your users on a monthly basis. With this method, you can charge your customers a small monthly fee instead of making them pay a large amount for the program upfront, and you can make more money in the long run. For example, many people pirate Microsoft Office instead of shelling out $300 upfront for a legal copy, whereas if it were offered software online in a format such as Google Docs, those same people might gladly pay $12.50 a month for the service. Not only do they get a web-based version that they can use on any computer, but everything they save is stored online and backed up. After two years of that user paying for your service, you’ve made as much money from that client as the desktop version, plus you’re ensuring that they’ll stay with you as long as they want to have access to those documents. However, if your users use the software for a month and decide they don’t like it, they don’t need to continue the subscription, and they have lost only a small amount of money. If you offer a trial-based subscription, users can test your software at no cost, which means they’re more likely to sign up.
Apple delivered in spades Tuesday when it reported its third fiscal quarter ended June 25. It came in with revenues up 82% to $28.57 billion when all the smart money on Wall Street was expected $25 billion. And it earned $7.31 billion or $7.79 a share, up 124%, when only $5.85 was expected. And it delivered a 41.7% gross margin. It was, as they say, a personal best. Its stock after-hours ran up 25 point as though it was Google and tickled $400 for a while there, an all-time high. Apple said it sold 9.25 million iPads, up 183%, moving every widget it could make. Apple’s acting CEO Tim Cook described iPad 2 sales as “frenzied.” He said 88% of the Fortune 500 was testing the iPad and claimed that decisions are being made faster than other products in his experience. iPad sales to K-12 passed Mac sales in the quarter, which surprised Apple. It’s moving from enterprise pilots to penetration and couldn’t help but notice that other tablets aren’t getting any traction. The dingus appears to have gotten over its scarcity. There are reportedly 1.05 million iPads in the channel. Supplies have improved since June. Supply and demand are even in harmony in some countries. Apple sold 3.95 million Macs, up only 14%, figuring it lost some Mac sales to iPad but not as many as Windows did. Lion is due out Wednesday which it thinks could get some fence sitters to move. Anyway, Macs are doing way better than other PCs, which are showing only 2.6% growth. Half the Macs went to people who never owned one before. Apple sold 20.34 million iPhones, up 142%, a lot of them in Asia. The only negative was iPods, down 20% year-over-year to 7.54 million, to no one’s particular surprise given the super-saturated music market. Apple offered its usual conservative guidance for this quarter, predicting that it would see $25 billion in revenues and earnings per share of $5.50 with a gross margin of 38%. It attributed its softer-than-seasonal tepidness to the expected product transition, which may impact inventories. The Street is expecting $27.69 billion returning $6.36 a share. Apple’s treasure vault is now bulging with another $10.4 billion to tip the scales at $76.2 billion. It’s returned $2.5 billion to AppStore developers. There are now 100,000 apps for the iPad. International sales accounted for 62% of the quarter’s revenue. Cook called China, defined as the mainland, Taiwan and Hong Kong, “key.”
When I learned Ruby on Rails, I was first and foremost impressed with ActiveRecord. For those who do not know ActiveRecord, it is a Ruby on Rails’ ORM layer, which is an equivalent to Hibernate in Java. However, ActiveRecord is easier to work with because it is based on conventions rather than configuration, and also it configures itselt at start time based on structure of data in the database. I was so impressed with ActiveRecord, that I was sure someone would implement it in Java, but after waiting a couple of years, I put a stop to wait and implemented it myself (with help of a few friends).
If you watch the news regularly, it is easy to notice that in almost any given week some company seems to have experienced an electronic break-in or in some other way experienced a form of computer or network compromise. While computer security professionals can help to mitigate such risks via the proper configuration of firewalls, careful crafting of Access Control Lists, the application of updates, and the judicious application of file permission, among other measures, it’s important that one of the most fundamental ways of improving the security of a computer or network resource not be overlooked – that of a really strong password. To this day passwords remain one of the weaker links in the security of electronic resources, and their potential for exploitation needs to be examined more carefully than ever. With the growing trend of cloud computing-based initiatives, many resources that were formerly enclosed within the wall of a business are now available over a network, thereby mitigating the physical security measures the previously helped to limit access to such resources. Given that many of these cloud-based solutions are accessed via user name and password combinations, a strong password is often the primary form of defense against illicit access.
Jaspersoft, the open source BI house, has gotten $11 million in new “strategic” capital financing. It’s coming from existing investors Red Hat, SAP Ventures and new investor Quest Software, along with the participation of all its existing major investors including Doll Capital Management, Morgenthaler Ventures, Partech International, Scale Venture Partners and Adams Street Partners. Jaspersoft’s already seen at least $32.5 million, with the last VC infusion maybe being a $12.5 million E round; it never did say. The money is evidently supposed fuel its “aggressive” product roadmap, global expansion and potential strategic acquisitions.
US antitrust chief Christine Varney is leaving the Justice Department early next month to join Cravath, Swaine & Moore, IBM’s pet outside law firm. There she’s supposed to specialize in antitrust issues related to mergers and acquisitions. The Wall Street Journal says Cravath almost never recruits partners from the outside. No successor has been named and the paper expects an interim replacement from inside the department to be named.
Without any hoopla or press releases, Intellectual Ventures (IV) quietly filed a second sweeping patent suit Monday charging Hynix Semiconductor and Elpida Memory, HP, Dell, Acer, Asustek – two of the largest memory chip makers in the world and a nice representative swat of the largest PC OEMs – with infringing five DDR2, DDR3 and GDDR4 memory patents in district court in Washington state. It also named Logitech, Kingston Technology, A-Data Technology, Best Buy, Wal-Mart and Pantech in the suit. Naturally IV wants treble damages.
As well as deploying new applications to the cloud, many organizations will also be considering the opportunities to migrate current applications to the cloud in search of reduced costs or SLA improvements. In this research note we consider several migration alternatives, expressed as a set of patterns. The patterns can also be seen as a sequence of activities, through which the current application is gradually modernized.
Cisco, which has been having trouble moving its switches up against competition from HP and Juniper et al, updated the Catalyst 6500 Tuesday, its most popular product even, generator of some $42 billion in revenue the last 12 years with 700,000 installations out there somewhere, a seeming indication that it had gotten some focus back on its most important business. The widgetry promises to let users plug the upgrade into existing chasses. Meanwhile, HP claims market share gains in networking at Cisco’s expense. Cisco’s switching business was down 9% in the April quarter to $3.3 billion and, although it continues to dominate, it’s supposed to have lost five points of share in the 12 months between 1Q10 and 1Q11.
Heroku, Salesforce.com’s bought-in Rack-/Ruby-on-Rails-based Platform-as-a-Service, has hired Ruby creator Yukihiro Matsumoto as its chief Ruby architect expecting he’ll make the language friendlier. Heroki couldn’t help point out that Ruby runs many of the world’s most popular brands like Comcast, Best Buy, AT&T’s Yellow pages, Hulu and Twitter. Heroku itself reportedly powers more than 150,000 apps written by Ruby developers.
If you are in IT, there is good chance that you are maintaining multiple B2B integration systems for data exchange and translation. Every IT leader has considered consolidating these products into a single B2B suite to reduce costs and improve supply chain agility. Historically, each B2B system has acted like a “black box,” providing little visibility and integration into the IT governance tools. This article outlines the benefits of a service-oriented architecture (SOA)-enabled approach to B2B and why it’s a better long-term strategy. As more and more companies adopt SOA and realize the importance of governance, it’s becoming critical to include the B2B suites into the SOA fabric and govern them as any other IT system. A well-thought-out SOA-based approach to B2B not only reduces the B2B expense but also provides SOA benefits such as improved governance, compliance, reuse and the ability to extend B2B processes to other IT applications.
Rumor has it that Oracle is soliciting Java royalties from Android device makers in case it wins its Android suit against Google and the price goes up. Deutsche Bank analyst Jonathan Goldberg says he heard from “various handset makers” that Oracle wants $15-$20 a device for Dalvik. He hasn’t heard of anybody signing up yet and the range sounds awfully like a first negotiating move. Microsoft, meanwhile, according to South Korea’s Maeil Business Newspaper, is supposedly trying to get $15 per Android device from Samsung, which would be triple the $5-a-device Microsoft is believed to be getting from HTC.
Judge William Alsup, who’s hearing the Oracle v Google suit over Android, has given the pair a terse one-paragraph order ahead of the Daubert hearing Google asked for next week to limit possible damages. “It appears,” he said, that it’s “possible that early on Google recognized that it would infringe patents protecting at least part of Java, entered into negotiations with Sun to obtain a license for use in Android, then abandoned the negotiations as too expensive, and pushed home with Android without any license at all.” He wants to know “How accurate is this scenario? Does Google acknowledge that Android infringes at least some of the claims if valid? If so, how should this affect the damages analysis? How should this affect the questions of willfulness and equitable relief? Counsel should be prepared to address these issues at the hearing” on July 21.
Part of the appeal of mobile services is that they are relevant to where you are right now. Most phones support GPS and a connection to the network. And when you combine those you get a convenient location based service. In this example application we are going to create a backend service in PHP that an iPad application on the front end will connect to
Read More:
BuildMobile: Building a GPS Enabled iPad Search App
via Comments on:
Digging around the web will unearth a heavy bias against the fold. “A rule of thumb that kills innovation.” “Used by people who don’t know what they’re talking about.” “A concept introduced by someone who is a moron.” “The fold is bogus.” “The fold is a myth.” “The fold is a silly thing that clients like to focus on.” “There is no fold.” There is even a web site called thereisnofold.com . This is not an issue that lacks for opinion. What is the fold and what do we know about it?
Read More:
DesignFestival: The Fold Exists but Does it Matter?
via Comments on:
You may have noticed the updated background on DesignFestival, currently, it is Winter Candy by Alex Walker. As mentioned earlier , we’ll be cycling through some of the backgrounds entered into the competition. Didn’t catch the contest? The Cicada Principle Explained Gallery of Entries Contribute to the Gallery Thanks again to all of the entrants for their great work, and we look forward to seeing more entries into the Gallery
Link:
DesignFestival: Cicada Principle — Winter Candy
via Comments on:
This is my last post in the Code Safari series here on Ruby Source. I have really enjoyed writing it and trying out a new format which I hope you have found useful. For my concluding article, I want to leave you with some tips for planning your own safari since that is really what the whole series has been about: Not your typical how-to, but a glimpse into the work flow that I and many other developers use everyday to figure out how our tools work. Here are five practices that you should incorporate in to your day-to-day craft
Read More:
RubySource: Code Safari: End of the Road
via Comments on: