The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘open-source’

As a full time systems administrator, I can tell you without equivocation that IT is hard. There are lots of little problems that occur.

Read more here: 
IT in a box: the ClearBOX

According to a regulatory filing, LA-based Magento Commerce, which develops an open source e-commerce software suite, has recently received a $22.5 million capital injection in an equity funding round.

Magento was originally a product developed and marketed by Varien, a 9-year old company that also delivers e-commerce business consulting and other services, but has now effectively been incorporated as a stand-alone venture. It’s unclear whether the financing of Magento comes from Varien, or if the latter company’s existing and / or other investors have stepped in to provide funding. Either way, the company says it concerns ‘fresh’ cash.

If I were to venture a guess, I would say PayPal plays a part in this story – from what I can gather the least you can say is that the digital payment company has a deep partnership with Magento that spans both co-marketing of their respective services as well as a collaboration on a product development level.

I had a brief chat with Tim Schulz, the former MySpace product manager who recently became Magento’s Senior Product Manager, who told me they’re positioning the Magento Commerce solution right in the center of various growth areas in electronic commerce and that its goal is to become the provider of the single largest e-commerce platform in the world. Bonus points for showcasing some ambition.

Magento currently has over 60,000 merchants using its software, which was downloaded about 1.5 million times as of January 2010. The company also says they’ve registered over $15 billion in transactions to date. The roadmap for the future is apparently paved with additional products, with a number of “Mobile Commerce, Saas offering and other products/services” coming later this year.

Here’s a video of Varien / Magento CEO Roy Rubin outlining his vision on open source e-commerce:

PayPal has just launched an upgraded iPhone application that adds new features and includes a facelift that’s meant to help instill a greater sense of security. And it also brings with it big news for Bump Technologies, the startup that lets you exchange information simply by tapping smartphones together: Bump is now prominently featured in the PayPal iPhone application as a quick way to initiate transactions.  You can download the free app here.

PayPal has offered a free application for the iPhone ever since the App Store launched in mid-2008, and it has gradually been improving over time. Today’s release brings a handful of significant new features. First, it now allows you to send a money request to your contacts (it’s essentially a bill). Second, you can now withdraw money out of your PayPal account and deposit it into your bank account. And there’s the Bump integration, which allows you to exchange money simply by tapping two iPhones together and entering the amount of the transaction — finally, an easy way to collect money from those friends who always seem to be out of cash.

The PayPal app includes a few more minor new features. There’s now an integrated tip calculator and bill splitter, as well as a reminder function that alerts you when you need to send or withdraw money. And the application now integrates the ‘PayPal For Kids’ program, which allows kids and teenagers to access a PayPal sub-account that’s linked to their parent’s.

PayPal’s iPhone app is only one component of the company’s mobile strategy. Last spring it partnered with RIM for the launch of the BlackBerry App World store, and it has also integrated with eBay’s mobile application. iPhone developers can easily integrate PayPal functionality using a PayPal library. And aside from the iPhone app, it offers native PayPal applications for Android and RIM phones as well (the company plans to brings these apps up to speed with the new iPhone release over the next few months).

This is also obviously very big news for Bump, which is still a young startup (the company took part in Y Combinator and was funded by Sequoia last fall). Bump and PayPal declined to disclose the details of the partnership.

When CoTweet sold to ExactTarget a couple weeks ago, the acquisition price was not disclosed. But an SEC filing put out today suggests that ExactTweet paid at least $8.1 million in stock for CoTweet. That is the value of “securities offered . . . as partial consideration in connection with a merger,” meaning there was likely a cash portion as well. While this isn’t a huge sum, it’s not a terrible return for an initial investment of $1.1 million.

CoTweet helps businesses manage multiple Twitter accounts and use it more effectively as marketing channel. The CoTweet acquisition is now being pointed to as an example of how businesses can be built on top of Twitter. So now we know how much the stock portion of the deal was worth.

Will we see more $8 million to $10 million deals in the near future, or do exits have to become bigger to make it worth creating a startup around Twitter?

IBM’s Open Collaborative Research is working on ways to get mobile Internet to the aged and illiterate all over the world. The initial research is happening in Japan and India and will be used to plan future endeavors including open source platforms for information sharing.

Go here to see the original:
IBM researching ways to help the aged, illiterate

The Linux Foundation, the non-profit that supports the growth of the Linux kernel, has launched a merchandise store where people can purchase a newly launched line of original T-shirts, hats, mugs and other items that reflect “geek culture.”

According a release sent out by the Foundation, merchandise available in the Linux.com store is “designed to reflect the unique and varied culture associated with Linux” and will support the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds. For example, t-shirts contain phrases like “Free The Code,” “FSCK the Establishment,” and “Fork You.” All revenue generated from the store will go directly towards Linux Foundation activities, initiatives and events.

In conjunction with the launch of the store, Linux is holding a t-shirt design contest. Design submissions are due on the store’s site by April 11, 2010. The top five designs will be available for community vote at Linux.com through June 6, 2010 and the winning design will be included on T-shirts available for purchase in the Linux.com Store. The lucky designer will be awarded with travel to Boston to attend the Foundation’s annual conference LinuxCon in August.

The Linus Foundation has launched a number of unique initiatives to help raise funds for the organization and its open source initiatives. Last year, the Linux Foundation launched a branded Visa credit card.

About the Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, the Linux Foundation sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and is supported by leading Linux and open source companies and developers from around the world. The Linux Foundation promotes, protects and standardizes Linux by hosting important workgroups, events and online resources such as Linux.com. For more information, please visit www.linuxfoundation.org.

Facebook is finally going to enter the location game at this April’s f8 conference, according to a report this morning on the NYT’s Bits blog. And they’re looking to take Google head on.

We’ve been hearing rumors about Facebook’s location features for a long time, but the buzz has picked up in the last few months. Those rumors got legs in October, when we noticed that the site had added language explicitly talking about location features to its rewritten privacy policy.

The question now is exactly what this location sharing will look like. I’ve heard that Facebook has tested simply attaching location data to user status updates, similar to the way Twitter does it. According to the report, Facebook will also offer an API to third parties, presumably allowing services like Foursquare to send their location data into Facebook (it’s unclear if data will also flow the other way, but I suspect it will once Facebook can get the privacy settings right).

Perhaps the most interesting part of the Times piece is the assertion that Facebook isn’t looking to beat Foursquare, Gowalla, and similar location based services — something that I believe it could easily do if it wanted to. Rather, it’s looking to beat Google in the small-business advertising space. The Times report doesn’t say much on how exactly Facebook is going to do that, but I suspect it will involve getting as many third parties as possible to integrate its API.

When I wrote that location would be this year’s Twitter at SXSW, I also meant that Twitter’s geolocation would be this year’s Twitter at SXSW. The service has just turned on geolocation on its website today for the first time.

While Twitter’s geolocation feature has been live through its API since last November, there was no sign of integration into the main twitter.com site until now. As you can see in the screenshot above, for tweets tagged with location, right next to the source of the tweet there is a location placemarker. When you hover over it, it turns blue, and clicking on it brings up a little Google map showing the location that tweet was sent from.

You can see these maps as overlays both on individual tweet pages, and on tweets in your main stream. In some cases, depending on how Twitter geolocation API is being used, it looks like place names are even passed through to Twitter. For example, here’s a tweet sent from Foursquare that also says where the tweet is being sent from.

The timing of this move by Twitter is significant. Earlier today, the New York Times reported that Facebook would unveil its answer to location next month at its f8 conference. Twitter’s first-ever Chirp conference takes place just one week before f8. Google, meanwhile, is in the game with Latitude and to some extent Buzz (but could have been in it a lot more). And of course, every app and their mother appears to be launching with some sort of location functionality at the SXSW in Austin, Texas, which begins on Friday. Many of those apps use Twitter’s geolocation API to pass the data back to Twitter, so it makes sense that this would be a good time to turn the functionality on for the website.

Update: It looks like Twitter has just turned off the location functionality after having it on for a bit. Look for it to come back shortly — certainly some time before SXSW.

[thanks Chad]

Twitter has quietly changed the wording on the button users need to press to update their statuses on the Twitter.com website. It took them 10 billion (or so) tweets to realize we don’t ‘Update’, we ‘Tweet’.

A lot of people are noticing the change, although I have to say I had to hit the refresh button of my browser a couple of times before I saw it too. Could be Twitter bucket testing or a caching issue on my side.

Update: it changed back to ‘Update’

This is of course a minor interface change and likely has nothing to do with the “nifty features” that were supposedly soon finding their way to the Twitter web interface, which is still the most popular client for, well, tweeting.

As a reminder: Twitter considers the word “tweet” to be a trademark of theirs, even though it hasn’t been officially assigned to the company yet.

Hat tip to @Orli for the heads up and the TwitPic.

Linus Torvalds, the inventor of the Linux kernel, has an absolute disdain for mobile phones. All of the ones he has purchased in the past, the man writes on his personal blog, ended up being “mostly used for playing Galaga and Solitaire on long flights” even though they were naturally all phones run on open source operating systems.

Things have changed now, he adds, now that he has caved and bought Google’s Nexus One a couple of days ago.

Torvalds has owned a number of phones before, including Google’s G1 device and ‘one of the early China-only Motorola Linux phones’, but it took for Google to add multi-touch capabilities to the Nexus One before he finally broke down and bought one from the company’s web store.

And he’s loving it:

But I have to admit, the Nexus One is a winner. I wasn’t enthusiastic about buying a phone on the internet sight unseen, but the day it was reported that it finally had the pinch-to-zoom thing enabled, I decided to take the plunge. I’ve wanted to have a GPS unit for my car anyway, and I thought that google navigation might finally make a phone useful.

And it does. What a difference! I no longer feel like I’m dragging a phone with me “just in case” I would need to get in touch with somebody – now I’m having a useful (and admittedly pretty good-looking) gadget instead. The fact that you can use it as a phone too is kind of secondary.

While Google hasn’t disclosed how many phones it’s sold so far, the company is believed to have sold closer to 100,000 than 1 million devices. But at least one of them made one of the most famous software engineers in the world one happy camper.