Lithium Technologies, an online enterprise communities solutions provider, has raised a $12 million in a Series B equity round led by Benchmark Capital.  Lithium had previously raised $9 million in a Series A in April 2007, which was co-led by Shasta Ventures and Emergence Capital.

Lithium provides on-demand solutions for enterprise communities, providing social networks, forums, live chat, instant messaging and other social tools.  They also provide API’s and an analytics solution all on-demand through their platform. Lithium-built communities are being used by 10.6 million average users per day across all their customers, and they have on average 2.2 billion messages sent per month. Some Lithium clients include PayPal, Dell, Symantec, AT&T, Playstation, and Barnes & Noble.

Lithium says that they will be using this funding to expand their social media service offerings and a more agressive business development approach (ie. the ‘bring in the sales guys’ phase). Lithium has a solid approach and track record, and is an easy route for building an insta-community around a brand or website. It is a space that is getting more and more competitive with a number of both self-install and hosted options available.

Microsoft today announced that after 2 years, their Office Live Small Business app had broken through the million subscriber mark. With one million businesses now managing their website, email and documents using OfficeLive, Microsoft have firmed up their position as a provider of online tools for the small business market against competition from Google and a host of others.

At the same time today over at Pingdom they noticed that the search mind-share for ‘web hosting’ is continuing its downward trend. Generic hosting seems to be on it’s way out – the type of hosting that can be purchased from GoDaddy, 1&1 and many others where the basic plan offers a control panel, a shared host and some bandwidth.

Generic hosting is not only being replaced by services such as Office Live and Google Apps, but for personal user networks such as WordPress.com and Blogger. For an SMB, there are a number of easy options available that require little development work and setup time with integration into other applications such as document management. The downward trend in generic hosting in favor of more specialized and integrated platforms will also definitely cut into the SMB web development market, as each of these solutions provide default templates that are easily branded and customized with a corporate identity.

With a million customers over at Microsoft and Google winning large contracts for million-plus user Gmail installs, the battle for the online app hosting in the SMB space is certainly only getting started. While Google have apps for domain, they are yet to fully integrate some of their other properties into the service such as Google Pages. Concurrently, Microsoft are yet to rollout, or even confirm or deny the existance or planning for a full web-based office application suite, but it is undoubtedly in the pipeline.

eWeek is reporting a rumor that Facebook are about to begin the move away from leased colocation to building out their own datacenters. What we do already know is that late last year Facebook leased out 10,000sq feet of datacenter space at a new facility built by DuPont Fabros Technology in Ashburn, Viginia, alongside both Yahoo! and MySpace. The lease coincided with a $240M investment from Microsoft which was announced at around the same time as the datacenter lease was organized. More recently, they raised a further $100M in March of this year specifically for infrastructure spend.

With Facebook now at beyond 10,000 live web servers, they are certainly able to reap greater benefits and cost efficiencies through building out their own hosting centers and infrastructure. With over half-a-billion dollars in funding, it certainly seems that Facebook are well into building out their own datacenters and infrastructure, with what is likely commodity hardware components for servers and a custom application stack. Facebook have also owned their own very large IP address space for a long time now and have managed it themselves.

Facebook use well-known technology stack, with Linux, PHP and MySQL. They claim to run one of the largest MySQL instances on the planet, and have contributed a number of patches to various open source projects. Vendors looking to line up Facebook may face a bit of a challenge, as like Google, they seem to keep a lot in house and build on open source (there were event rumors recently that Google were now even building their own switches).

AppleInsider is reporting today that a recent survey from investment bank RBC Capital Markets shows that over 50% of consumers looking to purchase a smartphone in the next 90 days are likely to purchase the new 3G iPhone which is scheduled for release on the 11th of July.

Symbian currently enjoys 65% of smartphone market share (53% Nokia), with Windows on 13% and RIM on 12%. With over 35M smartphones being sold each quarter, Apple could expect to ship over 15M iPhone 2.0 devices in the first quarter after release. To gain market share and accelerate past Windows and RIM, the iPhone would only need to sustain a 50% sale rate for two consecutive quarters. The iPhone market share for smartphone (or ‘converged’ devices) is currently at 7%, so the iPhone 2.0 could double, based on this survey, Apple market share relatively quickly.

Nokia shipped 60.5 Million smartphones in 2007, and it set to break the 100M device barrier for 2008. Apple have a very long way to go to surplant Nokia and Symbian, but the same survey reports that only 2% of respondants were considering purchasing a Nokia smartphone. Nokia is very strong internationally, but for the first time the new iPhone will see a very broad international launch on the 11th of July – launching in 21 markets including all of the big smartphone markets. The iPhone 2.0 will therefor not have the disadvantage its predecessor had – strong sales in the USA but a lag in releases to other international markets.

The smartphone market is going to be transformed throughout the next 12 months – not only because of the iPhone and Mac OS X but also because of the upcoming Andriod from Google, and Microsoft releasing frequent updates for Windows mobile. Defensive moves from Nokia via the open sourcing of Symbian and the ever-present RIM are always threatening to the new entrants and incumbants, although it seems that they are both losing market share to the iPhone, especially with the new enterprise features of the iPhone 2.0.

While currently Nokia leads RIM, Windows and then Apple and others – in a very short time we could see a huge shift in the smartphone platform market of the likes that were never imagined possible in the desktop PC market.

Statistics and numbers for this post were taken from Canalys Market Reports

In Febuary of this year, Microsoft announced its Interoparability Principals, a memo outlining the principals and goals that the company will aim to achieve as part of a broader standards-based interoparability and data portability initiative within the company. Today Microsoft have announced further actions it has taken towards complying with and following those interoperability goals it set out. The announcement today concerns:

• Full documentation and tech specs of Office 2007 Protocols and formats
• Tech docs for protocols in Sharepoint Server 2007
• Tech docs for protocols in Exchange Server 2007
• Furher and full documentation of brinary file formats used in Office (Word, Excel etc.)

In total, over 5,000 new pages of technical documents have been released today and have been added to the MSDN library for developers. This is a big step for Microsoft and firm proof that their support for open standards, data portability and interoperability extends to more than just press releases and announcements.

Interoperability and formats is now a whole section of the MSDN developer documentation, assisting developers in developing solutions that integrate with Microsoft client and server products. As part of the same initiative, Microsoft also announced three new tools that they have released in collaboration with other parties, they are:

• Universal Office Format (UOF) adaptors (eg. read/write) for Excel and Powerpoint (sourceforge)
• Open XML to HTML translator (codeplex)
• PowerTools PowerShell commands for Open XML (codeplex)

I believe we really are seeing a new Microsoft here – and their actions are really starting to speak louder than their words. It wasn’t too long ago that it was almost impossible to imagine Microsoft releasing documentation for Office file formats, or collaborating on a universal format adaptor for Office on Sourceforge. Developers looking to find out more (and I certainly will be) should checkout the Open Specifications section of MSDN, which has been updated this morning.

There is a new WordPress plugin out called Phone Factor being billed as a security solution for WordPress, and it has been emailed to me at least four or five times in the past few days. There have been a few security issues with WordPress recently, resulting in a number of automated attacks against self-hosted WordPress blogs (see earlier Techcrunch post). Following the latest series of posts about WordPress security, there were a large number of plugins recommended as either solutions to the security issue (impossible) or tools that help in detecting breaches or keeping a codebase up-to-date.

The Phone Factor plugin adds a second authentication layer to the WordPress login process by requiring that the user answers a phone call on login. On installation, the user is prompted to register an account with Phonefactor.com, a free provider of phone-based two-factor authentication. The solution is easy enough to setup, and simple enough to understand, but the problem is in the way in which this plugin is being presented – as a ‘solution’ to security issues in WordPress/

Two-factor is used by banks and enterprises as a way of proving identity, and from there, controlling access to data. The recent WordPress security issues have had to do with filtering and input parsing in PHP scripts, for which two-factor auth is by no means a solution. Prompting a phone-call for each WordPress login does nothing to secure the 270+ php scripts running in webroot as part of a standard WordPress install, and I can’t recall a single security issue or large-scale attack that could have been prevented had two-factor authentication been in place. Whats worse, disabling the second factor is extremely simple if an attacker has access to the local database or wpdb object, from where they can simply switch the plugin off. I have also never seen a phishing attack directed at a self-hosted blog that a two-factor auth solution would have prevented.

Applying a second-factor to something such as a login to a blog tips too far over in the conveniance/security scale – a scale where security improvements are measured against conveniance for an average user. For a blogger, being able to login simply and post quickly is important, and WordPress have put a lot of effort into making that process simple and easy for even the most basic user. Slowing that process down with phone-based authentication for little security gain in return is unlikely to attract many bloggers, most of whom are already struggling in managing their blogs correctly.

If WordPress is being used in an enterprise where two-factor is a policy requirement, the solution is to integrate WordPress authentication into the local domain – so that you don’t have to replicate a new identity structure. The larger solution is to manage your application installs correctly rather than to install-and-forget. With good management and with an understanding of threats.

Etelos has today announced Etelos Share, a new product that that provides a virtual-hosted server for businesses. The Etelos Share application allows a business to share and store documents internally using a hosted solution, with access to their virtual host through a local drive. The file sharing, storage and backup solution is a new addition to the Etelos suite of products which includes on-demand application hosting of many popular applications.

Etelos Share user accounts can be managed from the same interface used to manage other Etelos applications. From the control panel administrators can manage user accounts, billing, data, etc. Each user is granted their own user account and password via the administrators control panel, from where they are able to access, store and backup data and share with other users in their company.

In pricing Etelos Share starts at $4.95 per month, which includes 5GB of storage. Each additional GB is 35c per month – which is a little above the average cloud-based raw storage price at the moment. Hosted internal storage for SMB’s and larger enterprises is becoming a crowded market, with most vendors in the space offering simple raw storage along with web based or WebDAV interfaces. Etelos does offer a local drive adapter to make end-user usage simpler, and the solution also integrates with their other application offerings.

As Bill Gates closed the door for the final time Friday on his ex-office (Ballmer takes over Monday) the rhetoric about continued one day a week doesn’t match the reality. Whether you believe Bill will have an ongoing role in Office and Windows futures, I bet most of Bill’s input is already factored in by the owners of those two dominant sources of Microsoft revenue.

What comes next depends on whether Microsoft can pivot to the open Web paradigm as predicated in the Live Mesh strategy, or meander along while attempting to catch up in search and failing to buy Yahoo. You can find plenty of the latter analysis elsewhere, but here we’ll go for the throat of Microsoft’s disruptive opportunity by using a time-honored approach when faced with few facts but a lot of clues. Namely, building a case out of circumstantial evidence. And a smoking gun.

The Usual Suspects

Steve Sinofsky – owns Windows 7, classic old guard Redmond power broker who made his bones by leading the design of Office 95 and 97′s shared technologies. A decade later, he owns both the high ground of the Windows franchise and the boat anchor of Vista’s miserable hope-draining failure.

Bob Muglia – owns Servers and Tools, highly profitable group including Windows Server, SQL Server, Visual Studio, Virtualization, System management, and security products. In other words, the infrastructure on which to deploy Live services once Microsoft moves to the Cloud.

Robbie Bach/J. Allard – together they own the entertainment and mobility platforms, most importantly Xbox, Zune, and Windows Mobile. Mobile is one of three pillars of Windows 7, along with Windows Desktop and the Live Desktop.

The New Guy

Stephen Elop – owns Office, Microsoft Dynamics, and Unified Communications. Like the others, a member of the Senior Leadership team, Elop came from Juniper Networks after managing Macromedia’s absorption into Adobe. Unlike the others (who range from 15 to 20 years in Redmond), he arrived in January.

The Time Line

In concert with the Gates transition, Microsoft has begun revealing its Windows 7 plans. First, fix Vista. Sinofsky inherits the greatest channel in software history, namely the bits on most new machines. Forget the Back to XP crowd – buy a new machine, buy the OS. Sinofsky’s job: keep the trains running on time.

Second, Windows Mobile. Apple’s iPhone has certainly turned up the heat in percentage of Web clicks relative to Smartphone market share, but Microsoft enjoys a big lead in the power and sophistication of its developer tools. Blending the Windows desktop and Mobile platforms into a cohesive whole becomes mission critical, and the key to unlock that synergy is the Live Desktop.

Live Desktop

In August NBC will deliver 2200 hours of live Olympic coverage including more than 20 simultaneous live video streams, 3000 on-demand hours of full-event replays, metadata overlays of results, stats, analysis, and alerts, and all powered by Microsoft’s cross-platform Silverlight technology. The site’s plug-in page makes interesting reading, with Adobe Flash listed first followed by Windows Media Player, and Silverlight for “enhanced video experience for PC and Macintosh.”

This ecumenical support for Flash reinforces Bill Gates’ comments last year that users don’t care what Flash or Silverlight bits are on their machines, and can happily live with the small download and storage footprints of both. What they get with Silverlight, however, is a substantial subset of the .Net runtime, some 100 million installs by the time the torch lights in Beijing.

The Smoking Gun

On May 5, 2008 a document appeared on Microsoft’s Live Mesh site, Behind Live Mesh: Live Desktop architecture. Live Mesh is a tech preview of a platform for (initially) synchronization of data across multiple devices via a centralized cloud. Live Desktop, as the developer-targeted post describes, is a platfrom encompassing 4 elements: A generic presentation framework; Live Mesh communication layer; Live Desktop windowing system; and C# to JavaScript compilation with Script#.

In the words of the post’s author, Live Desktop developer Alex Himel, “When you view it today, you should see a visually appealing view of a desktop that works well cross-browser, performs responsively once loaded (and will soon load faster), and enables you to traverse your cloud.” Then, in the comments, Himel is prompted about what might come next, specifically Silverlight integration:

Currently, the Silverlight experience is limited to media. This feature was designed and implemented very close to the release as a way to validate Silverlight integration with our cloud and to offer a way to interact with media elements inline. You can expect to see significant iteration this summer around both this experience, as well as other uses of Silverlight within the desktop.

The current goal of the Live Desktop is to meet a lowest common denominator for basic functionality, and to offer an enhanced experience for users who do choose to download add-ons. A WPF version of the Live Desktop is unlikely because we want the Live Desktop to be available cross-platform and cross-browser. A Silverlight-only Live Desktop is certainly possible at some point in the future, but we are focusing on the HMTL/JavaScript version for now.

In other words, there is no plan to build Windows Presentation Foundation into Live Desktop but every intention of a Silverlight-only implementation. Such a Silverlight Desktop would accelerate demand for some version of cross-platform/browser Office functionality, particularly built around RSS and unified communications (aka public IM), the fundamentals of the Live Mesh tech preview that will be launched into a developer beta in October at the PDC.

The Summation

Ladies and gentleman of the Jury: With 100 million Live desktops, Stephen Elop’s seven years of intimate knowledge of the Adobe/Macromedia agenda combined with Silverlight’s advanced engineering of not just rich media but rich behavioral tracking and ad management and reporting, a revenue-generating Live Office beachhead seems imminent. When the realignment of power in Redmond consolidates, Sinofsky will be pinned down with a Windows 2009 or 10 release, Muglia will be powering Live Desktop with services from his profitable server group, Bach and Allard will be aligning Windows Mobile and Windows Desktop via the Live Desktop bridge – and Elop will be in the marketplace anywhere from a year to 2 ahead of any other group.

The Live Desktop is Mesh plus Silverlight. A Silverlight Office, however iteratively it is rolled out, will provide Microsoft the leverage to frame the discussion of an Internet Operating System. By mandating openness at all costs combined with a clear user contract trading software for services, the strategy puts Google and Apple in the position of explaining how they too get from here to there. Perhaps a SIlverlight-like runtime from either company is in the pipeline, but more likely are the Gears and SproutCore developer frameworks which are lighter-weight and less fundamental to each companies’ current success.

Contorting the words of Johnnie Cochran, if the glove fits you must convict. Will a Silverlight-only Live Desktop emerge soon after Election Day? If so, what will Microsoft or its developers do with it? Will Ray Ozzie, who spent the first half of his career as the most successful third-party application developer in Windows NT’s history with Lotus Notes, lead a wave of Live Desktop development under the rubric of Services with just enough Software? If the Himel post goes 404, maybe not.

I so want to befriend FriendFeed. It would be the right thing to do: Permanently screw with the commenters who correctly believe I’m an arrogant elitist who wants to maintain my flimsy status at the bottom of the C-List. Truth be told, I despise social media for the wasted time I’ve spent ignoring the next phase only to pathetically cave as soon as I see the tide of history passing me by.

34 days ago I carved FriendFeed a well-deserved new one as Twitter showed signs of leveling off at barely useful. Back then, IM and Track were protected from withering eyes by the random failures of the whole system; today the complete absence of real time network effects shifts the blame squarely on the the social media crowd and their inability to consolidate value. Summize has emerged as an adequate bandaid, but in so doing also suggests using FriendFeed’s Search function to similar effect.

Then the dominoes began to fall: Dave Winer injected some real emotion into the new cloud, recognizing as he frequently has done over the years that the power in disruptive transports depends on real human concerns to trigger the bootstrap phase. I think he finally realized that the decentralization evangelism didn’t fundamentally resonate with those who watch Dave for clues to the next direction. When he started engaging around his issues of A-List, pro blogging, and so on, people were forced to follow him into the silo.

In engaging with FriendFeed without subterfuge or TinyURL masking, Winer lent much needed credibility and validation to the cause. This wasn’t about Twitter’s failings. Honestly, I don’t know what it was about but it felt real, a nod to the new service that recalled his seminal validation of Twitter early in its run up. To be sure, Dave also pushed Pownce at a midway point to no particular effect. But this one felt different.

So I jumped in last night and started reading through the back archives. Where I thought I’d find a cacophony of trolls, I found something not all that different from the comment stream on my Saturday TechCrunch posts, except a bit more focused and less redundant. Perhaps the time spent out of the loop also spared me the learning curve of a threaded conversation, but again, not sure but better than expected. Maybe the new old guard of FreindFeed had begun to establish terms of engagement, subtle rules for the road rage that social networks incite.

Of course, I quickly retreated to Twitter, like a failed spouse trying to reclaim the magic. Having taken all this far more seriously than many and endured the burden of the messenger, I found Twitter largely intact but strangely devoid of something that I couldn’t quantify. Is it like the fall-off of traffic after the Bubble burst, or the return of the traffic on 101 in the past two years but not the frenzy? Do I think Twitter’s time has past. Only that am I sure of, that that isn’t true. Twitter will get fixed.

I still feel emphatically that FriendFeed is an iterative child of Twitter, an evolution of the Facebook activity stream without the confusion of the hoarding vibe of that service. The conversations may be siloed, but not because of business model concerns but rather a genuine question of how to reinsert the flow back into Twitter or some other originating source. My intuition suggests TinyURL could play a role in bundling up personalized versions of comment threads based on some follow/hide/search algorithm, where pruning of rude and time-wasting behavior weights the way things are aggregated.

But the current FriendFeed architecture is not granular enough to support the signals necessary to create sufficient value to justify the investment. Comments are not time stamped, requiring careful reading in context to identify a recent comment from a day-old one. This is an artifact of the lack of real time XMPP flow, which seems likely to appear soon. The explicit voting of the current system would be augmented, and perhaps replaced, by a more implicit filtering based on previous behavior and the user’s perception of the commenter’s credibility, insight, or entertainment value.

The endgame is not yet fully engaged, but the tiering of the FailWhale has produced a competition on a far more level playing field than I anticipated 34 days ago. The drip drip of Twitter API pauses and repetitive displays of old FriendFeed messages in Twhirl’s omnibus displays reminds me of the immaturity of both platforms, but the realization that the FailWhale serves all players in this rapid buildout augurs well for the near future.

Today is the last day at Microsoft as a fulltime employee for William Henry Gates III, but instead of yet another post about his legacy or what he has contributed to computing – we decided to put together a todo list for Bill now that he is retired. So, now that Bill Gates is retired, he can finally catch up on or do the following:

10. Finish writing “QBASIC For Dummies”
9. Switch to Gmail
8. Cure Malaria, AIDS and Hangovers
7. Migrate from Twitter to Friendfeed with everybody else
6. Actually go out and buy the 54 countries from the bottom of the world GDP ranking list (or the bottom 45% of households in the US instead?)
5. Wear a black turtleneck, jeans and sneakers and feel comfortable about it
4. Clear Hillary Clinton’s debt
3. Reply to Michael Arrington’s “request for comment” emails
2. Downgrade to XP
1. Go on “Dancing With The Stars”

If you have anything else to add, we will definitely pass it on.

In their recent quarterly earnings reaport, Redhat announced that their revenue was up for the first quarter of the year to $156 Million, which is up 33% on year on year results. Redhat are making strong gains in the middleware sector, with JBoss leading their revenue increase along with associated sales of operating system support.

JBoss is a leading open source web application server that competes head to head with commercial solutions from Oracle/BEA and IBM. RedHat acquired Jboss for $420M back in early 2006, and the company has experienced solid growth since entering the middleware market with the product.

RedHat also recently announced the availability of a beta of the JBoss platform running on Amazon EC2. Amazon and Redhat have always had a strong relationship, with Redhat supplying the company with IT services for a number of years now. The announcement of the beta of JBoss on EC2 co-incided with Redhat’s new cloud computing initiative, which seems set to attempt to promote RedHat products and services in the cloud computing space.

It has been long-known that online collaboration tools, voice and video conferencing, and other technologies can save a lot of travel and time, and now some companies are extending these same tools to lower greenhouse emissions. Catalyst Resources, designer of user interfaces and web applications, have run a trial to work out the enviromental savings of using a simple web-based collaboration platform. Initially an attempt to boost productivity by coordinating team activities and client relations online, Catalyst found that the platform encouraged telecommuting and eliminated the need for team meetings and face-to-face interaction. As a result, travel became less of a necessity, and the environment was spared an estimated 21,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions per month. All this while reducing expenses and increasing billable activities by nearly 20%.

Catalyst stressed that excellent user experiences were vital to the platform’s success, otherwise the idea would never have survived in a world dominated by email, face-to-face meetings, and hard copy documents.

Saving the world? Maybe an exaggeration, but it’s a step in the right direction. For more on the experiment check out the release from Catalyst.

Yesterday at Sun Steve Gillmor and I caught up with Ian Murdock, VP of Developer and Community Marketing and Zack Urlocker, VP of the Database Group after they had both finished speaking at the Sun Open Source Business Intelligence Summit. Ian has been at Sun for little over a year now, and was the founder of the Debian Linux distribution. His role at Sun is to evangelize the Sun platform and products to developers and the open source community, as well as working on the productization and commercialization of open source products.

Zack joined Sun through their acquisition of MySQL, and now heads up the database group at the company. Zack spoke at length about MySQL, their new role in Sun, marketing open source and business models during his talk and presentation. Here are the two of them on video talking about the new Sun, with their business focus on leading with open source (Sun being the number 1 contributor of open source code of any company) and developing it as a solid business for the company.

Sun has announced that they will package their recently-acquired MySQL database server with their Glassfish application server together for a new price of $65,000 per annum. The Sun pricing model is a flat model per-customer and includes support and upgrades. Yesterday at Sun we heard their claim that most companies report saving up to 90% when switching from traditional enterprise database servers to MySQL.

With the Glassfish application server Sun is competing with JBoss (RedHat), Websphere from IBM, the Oracle application suite and many more. The commercial vendors control a vast majority of the revenue in the Java application server market, namely Oracle/BEA and IBM. Glassfish also competes directly with other open source application servers like JBoss and Tomcat. The usual fee for MySQL from Sun is $40,000 per year, so as part of this package Glassfish support and updates are being offered for an additional $25,000.

At the conference we attended yesterday, the Sun representatives spent a lot of time talking about their strategy of simplifying open source development and deployment by packaging components or modules together and attaching Sun services (support, etc.). This MySQL and Glassfish packaging is a part of that strategy, which is still in its formative stages but is likely to make the Sun product suite more attractive to enterprises looking for a full-stack single vendor solution.

Encoding.com has relaunched to address the new cost, quality, and scalability encoding issues that have emerged with the explosion of internet and mobile video applications.

As a company that formerly hand coded and archived source video content, Encoding.com believes they can bring Internet and mobile video applications to the next level by providing a cost efficient, robust, and scalable encoding service that allows companies to focus on creating quality video content rather than investing heavily in encoding infrastructure. The end result is a dynamic encoding cloud made available as an on demand web service in an XML API. Customers send in their source content in any popular format, and receive encoded media at a location of their choice, in the format of their choice. The company hopes this technology will facilitate the development of higher quality video content on the web.

Encoding.com is part of a growing number of web services offering cloud computing options that promise to help businesses cut back on hardware infrastructure costs. Other services that offer cloud computing are Amazon’s EC2 and Parascale, who recently secured a large sum in first round funding. These services, however, are not dedicated to video conversion.

Microsoft has announced it plans to acquire MobiComp, a Portuguese software company. MobiComp’s software allows users to back-up, share and discover content on mobile phones. The company sells their software to mobile phone operators including Vodafone, TMN and Cellcom.

Founded in 2000, MobiComp has been privately funded and according to its website has been profitable since its first year in business. Microsoft plans for the company to contribute to the Microsoft Mobile Communications Business in addition to serving its existing customers. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Steve Gillmor and I are here at the Sun Campus in Menlo Park, CA for a conference on Open Source Business Intelligence. Zack Urlocker is the VP of the Database group at Sun, he came to the company via MySQL.

12:40 – Zack came to Sun through MySQL. MySQL were planning to IPO, but they were interesting in what Sun were doing. Says that Sun has come a long way in the past 5 or 6 years as being a strong supporter of open source and a very strong advocate – which is what MySQL found attractive. Zack says that 5 years ago it was difficult to imagine Sun open sourcing Java or Solaris, but those moves sent a strong message that Sun were very serious about open source.

12:43 - The Sun acquisition of MySQL extends suns reach into the LAMP stack, better positions Sun as a web platform and Sun’s resources assists MySQL’s capacity to delivery solutions and support.

12:45 – Zack spent a lot of time recently tlaking to large enterprises, and has noticed that the trend towards open source within the Fortune 100 has shifted dramatically recently. MySQL refer to the trends as Enterprise 2.0, and it is a very real trend and it has driven a big increase in revenue at MySQL.
Main stats:

• 12 years old
• 400+ employees
• 750 partners
• 70,000 downloads per day
• Customers across every major OS, hardware vendor, geography, industry and app type.
• MySql were at $100M revenue when they were acquired by Sun

12:47 – MySQL were optimized as a web application database. They never set out to comepte head to head with Oracle or the large RDBMS providers. MySQL set out to be a disruptor, and they found their niche in the web area, just as web applications and the open source web stack was being formed and usage was accelerating.

12:49 – MySQL marketing has a very strong emphasis on case studies and references. A very strong tip for similar companies looking to sell their solutions into the enterprise. Rather than the fat Oracle approach of RFP’s and large-scale sales teams, have solid real-world and public examples, and easy entry point (Eg. the free download) and the product, if good, will sell itself. Deployment stats:

• Average deployment is 2-3TB
• Largest deployment is 10,000 servers (its not Google)
• The largest deployments employ sharding
• 35% of users of Oracle users are running MySQL as well side-by-side, the penetration is higher than Oracle Express

12:55 – Case studies!

Frontier Airlines:

• 4 years of historical ticket data
• 800 million records, half a terabyte of live OLAP data
• 4 server greenplum cluster
• Most queries under 8 seconds

Orbitz

• Self service portal for travel agents with integrated reporting
• 2500 users with contract renewal, ordering and reporting
• Using Redhat, MySQL, Pentaho
• $1M in TCO savings

EnteraSys

• Embedded BI reporting
• Intrusion detection appliance used in F500 companies, governement
• Logging millions of events per day for 3000 customers
• Using debian mysql and jasperreports
• Requires highly scalable custom reporting

1:00pm – IDC is reporting that data wharehouses are growing, but not as large as the press reports. Gor eg. 60% of data warehouses are under a terabyte, and only 4% are larger than 25TB – so it is a classic ‘pyramid’ market, so it is definitely not a one-size-fits-all market, with most of the market being at the lower end (where MySQL and Postgres are used)

1:07 – The key architectural advantage of MySQL is that the storage engine is a plugin, with a common base, interpreter, optimizer etc. It means that on a case-by-case basis an architect can select the appropriate storage engine depending on their requirements. The built in engines cover most case, but there are numerous commercial and open source storage engines available varying from the simple such as CSV file support through to column-oriented datasets.

1:15 – Long conversation about NDBCLUSTER, which is the storage engine now known as MySQL cluster – which is a shared-nothing architecture that allows high availability and scalability. Lots of discussion about the difference between what MySQL are doing, and what companies like Facebook are doing with building a small-scale SQL engine running on top of Hadoop. Yahoo! are also running a very large-scale Hadoop instance, and are building a light-end SQL engine on top of it. NDBCLUSTER is currently running in numerous Telco datacenters – such as at Vodafone, France Telecom, Nokia etc. etc.

1:20 – MySQL and the open source business model – enterprise server, monthly rapid updates, hot fix programs, monitoring, web-based central console, expert advice, 24/365 support – this model is working really well for MySQL, it took a while for them to get there but with a $100M annual run-rate it is a real working open source based business model. MySQL is on average 90% cheaper than Oracle, Sybase etc.

1:25 – Oracle just announced a 15% across-the-board price increase. MySQL charge $40k per year, per customer – regardless of CPU, usage, size etc. etc. They are commiting to a flat-rate and that pricing structure. MySQL have a very capable product and a strong economic argument, and they are making very strong inroads into the large-scale enterprise space.

In addition to the re-org at Yahoo, the company is also creating a new division to focus on building and implementing a cloud computing platform. Google and Microsoft have each released or announced parts of their cloud platform plans, while Yahoo had previously kept a tight lip.

From Yahoo’s press release…

In order to expand its cloud computing capabilities, the Company will form a Cloud Computing & Data Infrastructure Group, charged with developing a computing infrastructure that balances scalability with cost effectiveness. It will move all consumer-facing platform teams to the Audience Technology Group, led by Venkat Panchapakesan. In addition, it is putting new leadership in place behind Yahoo!’s search group, naming Prabhakar Raghavan to direct search strategy and Tuoc Luong as the interim leader of the search product team.

We are trying to get more details about this news, and as we find out new info we will be updating here.

FriendFeed is an example of a new type of aggregator where multiple data types, or streams, for a user can be bought together. The difference between this new type of aggregator and the standard RSS feed-reader type of aggregator is that the later does a good job of supporting a set of formats that are almost standard, while the new aggregators such as FriendFeed are building in app-specific support.

The disadvantages of this model are that only the selected applications can participate in the aggregator and network, a disadvantage to smaller providers and a position that would only cement the place of the more popular services. In addition, service-specific API support would not scale very well, as every API update and nuance would have to be tracked, maintained and debugged.

A very important issue is how feed and data types should be standardized to allow all application providers to participate in aggregator ecosystems such as FriendFeed, rather than just the 41 selected and supported.

The 41 services provided are just feeds, be it plain descriptive XML or RSS or Atom or some variation thereof, they are effectively feeds of varying data types. They can be easily broken down into the different categories and hence data types – such as link feeds, content feeds, image feeds, event feeds etc. etc. Currently each application API developer implements what they feel is a good format for an API (and often poorly) and it is often very different to what similar applications provide.

With generic feed standards, either through the use of Microformats or the use of defined namespace extensions, it would level the field so that any application or service can participate rather than those that are popular amongst the digerati. Imagine if the earliest news feed readers only supported a set of 41 sites? So you wouldn’t even be able to subscribe to your own blog, let alone the blog of a friend or colleague.

For some reason, outside of content feeds (blog RSS feeds), the other formats have developed in a sporadic and non-standard manner. The standardization of feeds around data types has almost reached a point of becoming an urgent priority, as the mechanisms that previously worked well in defining standard formats broke down with the new types of shared media.

FriendFeed recognize the problems and have commited to supporting the Media RSS standards, but Bret from FriendFeed also said that opening up the aggregator could result in more noise and spam which would drive away users. I believe that the problem may be overstated, and a subscription-based model effectively results in pure, chosen content.

Either way, the next messaging or photo sharing application being built should be able to build an API based on a standard spec for each data type. While there are plenty of new standard format efforts (and new efforts seem to launch every other day), there hasn’t been a best practice decision made by the key influencers (eg. FriendFeed – a bigger stream aggregator) and developers to force the issue.

This could be solved by a large-scale web services proxy, but it would be better if format proxying was only an interim solution.

Synchronization, backup, and sharing solution Syncplicity today announced the launch of a new open platform that they hope will enable the next generation of Cloud Computing applications.

The new platform allows developers to extend their web-based applications directly to the desktop, creating seamless interaction between online applications and files stored locally on the desktop. The service is built on open standards to enable synchronization of files not just across computers and devices, but also on the web. Desktop files can now be accessed instantaneously in either online or local applications, giving web apps equal versatility on the desktop. Furthermore, files can be edited in any application, whether online or on the PC, and automatically backed-up and saved directly to the user’s hard drive. This spares users the trouble of locating recently saved files, and allows them to choose the most desirable application without worrying about where their data may be stored.

Syncplicity also has announced a new pricing plan with free and premium accounts, as well as three partnerships with leading web-based services for documents and photos: Sribd, Zoho, and Picnik.